The Green Bicycle Mystery Blog Tour

Woohoo!  Welcome to The Green Bicycle Mystery Blog Tour where I have a fabulous extract to share with you all as well as a great photo from the ACTUAL case files!  Let’s first find out a bit more about the author and this intriguing book!

About The Author

Antony M. Brown is an award-winning essayist, former magazine editor-in-chief and member of the Crime Writers’ Association. He published several Cold Case Jury e-books – true crime mysteries in which the reader is invited to deliver the verdict on what most likely happened – before signing a four book deal with Mirror Books in January 2017. See www.coldcasejury.com

Website: http://www.coldcasejury.com
Blog: http://www.ccjforum.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ccjury
Amazon page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Antony-M.-Brown/e/B019QMY2JW

About The Book

A true crime mystery, a case unsolved for almost 90 years.

In the Summer of 1919, on a lonely lane in rural Leicestershire, a solitary bicycle lies on its side, its metal frame catching the glow of the fading evening light. Next to the bicycle, lying at an angle across the road, is the dead body of a young woman, her right hand almost touching the mudguard of the rear wheel. She was last seen with a man on a green bicycle, who seemingly vanishes into thin air.

Now dramatic new evidence is revealed for the first time, but does it solve the case or deepen the mystery? You decide.

The Green Bicycle Mystery is the first book in the Cold Case Jury Collection. Each one tells the story of an unsolved crime in an evocative and compelling way, it presents fresh evidence, exposes the strengths and weaknesses of past theories and then asks the reader to decide what happened.

Sounds amazing, right?!  Well read on! 

THE GREEN BICYCLE MYSTERY Cold Case Jury Collection by Antony M Brown

Mirror Books

In the first of a new collection of intriguing historic murders, Cold Case Jury presents The Green Bicycle Mystery. Don’t just read about a murder… solve it!

EXTRACT from the opening of CHAPTER 1: A LAND FIT FOR HEROES

In a lonely lane running through rural Leicestershire, a solitary bicycle lies on its side, its metal frame catching the glow of the fading evening light. Its back wheel slowly turns about its axle, producing a soft clicking; a rhythmic sound, soothing like the ticking of a study clock.

Next to the bicycle, lying at an angle across the road, is a young woman. She is partly on her back, partly on her left side, with her right hand almost touching the mudguard of the rear wheel. Her legs rest on the roadside verge, where fronds of cow parsley and rosebay rise above luxuriant summer foliage. On her head sits a wide-brimmed straw hat, daintily finished with a ribbon and bow. She is dressed in a pastel blouse and long skirt underneath a light raincoat, the pockets of which contain an empty purse and a box of matches.

The blood-flecked coat tells a story: the afternoon had threatened rain, but the evening has brought death. The left side of her head is heavily bloodstained, and her brown eyes are fixed in a cold, lifeless stare. From underneath her hat, creeping fingers of crimson slowly percolate through the weathered gravel. A macabre trail of bloodied bird tracks leads back and forth from the body to a nearby wooden gate, its top sporting the same marks like a sinister satanic rite. From the gate, a path has been beaten across the wispy grass of a small meadow, snaking towards a golden field of corn beyond. It appears to have been made by human feet – and recently.

The turning wheel comes to rest with a final click. On the other side of a high hedge, a grazing rabbit in the meadow freezes, its ears pricking up. For a fleeting moment there seems to be no sound or movement anywhere, not even a summer breeze to tremble the full-bodied trees that line the lane. Nature holds her breath, as if even she has been shocked into silence by the senseless death.

A deep bellow, like the tolling of a bell, echoes across the fields. Further along the lane, amid a sea of flicking tails and lolloping heads, a farmer nonchalantly herds his heifers. In a few languid minutes, accompanied by a raucous cawing of quarrelling crows in distant tree tops, the grisly scene will be discovered.

And the mystery will begin.

The above  is an image from the courtroom. This is a really rare photo, as pictures inside the courtroom were very hard to come by. The caption is:

Looking down, Ronald Light appears pensive during his trial. In front of him are his legal team. Behind him, his mother looks on, as do the packed crowd from the gallery.

Image provided by Mirror Books. Taken from Antony M. Brown’s The Green Bicycle Mystery: Cold Case Jury Collection.

My thanks to Nicola Slavin of Book Machine Works, Mirror Books and the author for this awesome extract and photo!  If you are as intrigued about this book as I am, click the book below to grab yourself a copy!