Rippple Media

The award-winning author of A Little Leg Work and The Book of Names is back, with a crime-comedy-caper set in Perth, Australia. Quintus Huntley: Botany is coming on 13 October, and is the first book in a series featuring the washed-up poet turned detective Quintus Huntley.

Poetry might not be able to save the world, but it can help to catch a killer, so Huntley discovers. When his sole poetry collection The Ragged Claws of Ravensthorpe is found in the case of a gruesomely murdered violinist, Detectives Everest and Booth think Huntley did it. But he’s innocent, and the best way to prove it is to find the killer himself.

In the violinist’s apartment, Huntley reimagines the crime as poetry, getting an idea who killed her and why. Assisted by the octogenerian hacker Henrikson, Huntley investigates, but even as new leads appear, the bodies
pile up, as the killer strikes each day, using a natural poison each time. Only Huntley is convinced the cases are connected.

Sceptical at first, Detective Everest starts to see the ability Huntley has. Aphra Massey (a friend of the dead violinist) provides key insights from the political and drug sides that help them close in on the killer. But even when the killer is caught, something bigger is afoot. Will Huntley, Everest and Massey figure it out in time to stop an opportunistic criminal from escaping the country?

A single working week, four corpses deep
Enter the fray, the rum-soaked poet
The visionary who sees stories in his sleep
To find the killer shall he write like one
And from the verse, the causality comes
All the answers are in the stanzas

Who is Quintus Huntley? Early 40s, divorced from the wealthy Giorgina Gifford and father to 13-year-old Verity. He lives in a caravan and works part-time at the University of WA, where his office is a windowless transport container. He feels life is passing him by and his writing will be blocked forever, but then a crime saves him and results in inspiration. He’s analogue, forgetting to take his phone with him and preferring pen
and paper for writing poetry. He doesn’t care about money and is usually broke. He is kind (with a mean streak), funny (also with a mean streak), perceptive and loveable. His storytelling skills enable him to see into the future. Poetry is his way of making sense of the world.

Royce Leville is the author of A Little Leg Work, which won the Fiction category of the 2012 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, and The Book of Names, a short story collection which had Mikelis made into a short film starring James Cosmo.