Serpent's Tooth

Antony Maitland #18

by Sara Woods

To the citizens of Arkenshaw, Yorkshire, Mr and Mrs Alfred Baker and their twelve foster children represent the ideal family, respected for their closeness and mutual concern. When seventeen-year-old Joe Baker fatally assaults his father, barrister Antony Maitland finds himself with a new client—a tight-lipped one at that. The bleak industrial town of Arkenshaw is not unfamiliar territory to Maitland, and as he begins to look for the motive that led to his young client’s murderous act, he finds himself enmeshed in the tight-knit society of the town, its gossip, and its unwillingness to face the whispered-about activities of its younger generation.

(Publisher’s description)

Genres: Mystery

190 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

(Lana Hutton Bowen-Judd)
UK (1922 - 1986)
aka Anne Burton, Mary Challis, Margaret Leek

Born in England, she was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Filey, Yorkshire.

During the Second World War, she worked in a bank and as a solicitor's clerk in London. Here she gained much of the information later used in her novels. Lana married Anthony George Bowen-Judd on April 25, 1946. They ran a pig breeding farm between 1948 and 1954. In 1957 they moved to Nova Scotia, Canada. She worked as a registrar for St. Mary's University until 1964. In 1961 she wrote her first novel, Bloody Instructions, introducing the hero of forty-nine of her mysteries, Anthony Maitland, an English barrister.

Her last years she lived with her husband at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.