GENTLY WITH THE PAINTERS

By Alan Hunter

Synopsis

he death of a young artist leaves Gently desperately piecing together the portrait of a murderer. When artist Shirley Johnson is murdered and her body dumped outside a provincial police headquarters, Gently is despatched from London to Northshire to take over the investigation. The prime suspect appears to be the woman's husband, a former bomber pilot with a guilty secret, but the other members of the woman's art group also have strong views about her and her controversial final painting - Dark Destroyer. With so many suspects to consider, Gently must get to the bottom of the mystery before the murderer manages to slip through his fingers.

Sample Player

Narrator	Richard Simpson
Length	8hrs 30mins
Catalogue No.	15896
Publisher	Robinson; 2011

Other audiobooks by Alan Hunter

GENTLY BY THE SHORE

In a British seaside holiday resort at the height of the season, you would not expect to find a naked corpse, punctured with stab wounds, lying on the sand. Chief Inspector George Gently is called in to investigate the disturbing murder. Who knows where or when the murderer might strike again?

GENTLY CONTINENTAL

Good music, fine dining and comfortable surroundings - that's how the Hotel Continental is advertised. Fraud, blackmail, torture and murder - that's what it becomes famous for. The popular hotel on the English coast built its reputation on its Viennese cuisine and Austrian style but when one of the guests is found dead at the bottom of the nearby cliffs bearing the wounds of a man who has been systematically tortured, Gently brushes aside the hotel's facade of respectability. International intrigue and a dark secret that stretches from Nazi-occupied Austria across the Atlantic to the back streets of New York leave Gently juggling with a deadly conundrum.

GENTLY DOES IT

Chief Inspector Gently's quiet Easter break is rudely interrupted when a local timber merchant is found dead. The Norchester police gratefully accept Gently's offer to help investigate the murder, but he soon clashes with the officer in charge of the case. Locking horns with the local law is a distraction Gently can do without when he's on the trail of a killer.

GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM

Chief Inspector Gently's fishing holiday on the waterways around Norchester is interrupted by the discovery of a local man's body in a burnt out boat. Somewhere beneath the lies of the victim's wife, obscured by the brittle edge of her daughter's fear and hidden by her son's hysteria, lies the truth. Gently's only hope is to sweep aside the litter of chaos and confusion to uncover the identity of the killer.

GENTLY FLOATING

Gently wades through a torrent of suspects when a body is found floating face down in the river. Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing - that's if you can call having too many potential murderers, 'a good thing'. What Gently has to work out is which of them had the cold blooded nerve to smash the victim's skull and dump him in the river.

GENTLY GO MAN

When a teenage biker is killed in a crash, most people regard it as an inevitable consequence of the kids using drugs and racing bikes for kicks. But the evidence points to the young man's death being something more sinister than a mere accident and Chief Superintendent Gently is drawn into a world populated by disaffected teenagers.

GENTLY IN THE SUN

When a young woman is discovered lying dead on the beach, Chief Superintendent Gently joins the throngs of summer visitors in the midst of a summer heatwave, to investigate. But when the long-buried skeleton of a woman is unearthed close to where the body was found, Gently suddenly has the riddle of two mysterious deaths to solve.

GENTLY NORTH-WEST

There's blood in the heather and a murderer on the loose when Gently pays a quite visit to the Highlands of Scotland. Had Brenda Merryn not been such a strong-willed woman and had she not been so much in love with George Gently, driving all the way to Scotland for a holiday with Gently's sister and brother-in-law might have been a bit of a challenge. Spying on a heavily armed private army of nationalists, being held at gunpoint on the hillside, being held prisoner in a filthy outhouse and becoming involved in a murder would be unthinkable.

GENTLY SAHIB

If a tiger mauled a man to death, would he bother burying the corpse? An escaped tiger that terrorizes a little market town is shot dead by a police marksman, having caused nothing more than a minor panic. A year later, a man is found mauled to death and neatly buried in his own back garden. The only thing Gently can be sure of is that the tiger didn't bury the body, so who did? Number 12 in the Inspector George Gently series.

GENTLY THROUGH THE MILL

When petty crook Steinie Taylor turns up dead in a hopper of flour at a country bakery, Inspector George Gently has to figure out not only how he got there, but also why his prime suspects all appear to have a dark secret to hide. Why had the deceased villain and his two friends been spending money like it was going out of fashion? Why did Taylor's friends both disappear? The investigation becomes even more sinister when one of Taylor's cronies is also found dead.

GENTLY TO THE SUMMIT

Mountaineer Reginald Kincaid was believed to have died during an expedition to climb Mount Everest, so it comes as a shock when he turns up again 22 years later. The mystery is compounded by the death of Arthur Fleece, Kincaid's climbing partner on the Everest attempt. The feud that had developed between Fleece and the resurrected Kincaid sparks a murder investigation for George Gently with a 'dead' man as the prime suspect...

GENTLY WHERE THE ROADS GO

Chief Inspector George Gently finds himself dodging bullets when he investigates the murder of a trucker who died in a hail of gunfire. Murdered in a lonely lay-by in the heart of the countryside, the trucker is identified as a Polish immigrant. Was this a revenge killing, a quarrel over money, an underworld execution or something even more sinister?

GENTLY WITH THE INNOCENTS

When an old man is found dead at the foot of the staircase in his rambling old house, a hint of murder and the lure of hidden treasure draw Gently into the case.Gently has plenty of suspects for the old man's murder. A warehouse watchman across the street misses nothing that goes on at the house, but can shed no light on the murderer. A local antiques dealer knows a suspicious amount about the house and a good deal more about the treasure that is thought to be hidden within its walls.When the murderer strikes again, Gently has a high profile case on his hands and faces a night of sheer terror alone in a house whose secret has claimed at least two lives . . .

GENTLY WITH THE LADIES

A police man-hunt fails to find the husband of a brutally murdered woman - until he turns up in Gently's office. The hunted man is, in fact, a far-distant relative of Gently and throws himself on the Chief Inspector's mercy. Gently will have none of it and is ready to hand the man over to his colleagues in charge of the investigation, but there are some intriguing elements to the case. The fact that the prime suspect had fled to be with his mistress and then taken to the open sea in a chartered yacht seems hugely incriminating.

LANDED GENTLY

Having been invited to spend Christmas in the country, Chief Superintendent Gently finds himself investigating when a guest at Merely Hall, a nearby stately home, is found dead. At first the tragedy is assumed to be a simple accident, but Gently is not one to jump to conclusions and is soon in no doubt that this was murder.

OVER HERE

In 1997 a group of WW2 American veterans visit their old air base, where they find a skeleton from fifty years ago. Can Inspector Gently solve this crime from so long ago?