Parting Breath (The Calleshire Chronicles)

In this thrilling crime novel by CWA Diamond Dagger winner Catherine Aird, a student’s last words are all that Detective C. D. Sloan has to go on in his latest case

There are rumblings throughout the campus of the University of Calleshire, talk of a sit-in, of revolt, of H? Chí Minh, of discontent. Malcolm Humbert has been expelled, and the students are livid. Meanwhile, the faculty is equally out of sorts—Hilda Linaker just wants to finish her treatise on Jane Austen, Bernard Watkinson is tired of dealing with the female students’ vehement—and possibly dangerous—opinions, and Simon Mautby can’t find a lab tech to help with his ecology experiments. When someone breaks into a dorm room, leaving behind little evidence but a single kernel of corn, it’s time to call in the police.
 
But no one—not the professors, the students, or even the great detective C. D. Sloan—could have predicted murder. A young woman finds a second-year student slumped against a cloister’s column, covered in blood. Before he dies, he manages to breathe the words “twenty-six minutes.”
 
The brilliant and acerbic inspector C. D. Sloan, recently reunited with his assistant, Detective Constable Crosby, must connect a seemingly unrelated burglary to a senseless murder—with nothing more to go on than those eerie last words.