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Cover of Come to Dust by Penny Freedman: a glowing dandelion seed head against a starry black sky

Come to Dust

The latest in the Gina Gray crime series featuring a sharp-tongued, pushy grandmother amateur detective. In this adventure she is joined by her 16-year-old granddaughter, Freda, to solve the crime of dead academic.

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Penny Freedman’s detective, Gina Gray, is a woman you love or hate. She is, as her teenage granddaughter says, ‘bossy, loving, infuriating’. Her chief talents as an amateur detective are nerve, bloody-mindedness, and an acute ear for the niceties of the English language. Her relationship with Detective Inspector David Scott is an uncertain and rocky one, but as a crime-solving partnership they are unbeatable. In a series of books that moves from Kent to London, the Lake District and Scotland, murder follows Gina in her multitasking life as teacher, mother, grandmother, part-time lover, know-all and supersleuth. Love her or hate her? You decide.

Black and white photograph of Penny Freedman smiling, wearing a striped collarless top

Penny Freedman

Penny Freedman grew up in Surrey. She studied Classics at Oxford and later did postgraduate work in Linguistics, writing a PhD thesis on Shakespeare’s pronouns. She has taught Latin, Greek, English, Drama and Linguistics in schools, colleges and universities in London, Kent and Warwickshire. Along the way, she has also been a mother, theatre reviewer, Samaritan, and amateur actor and director. She is a gluttonous reader, a passionate theatre-goer, a human rights activist and committed feminist. Her detective heroine, Gina Gray, is the woman Penny might have been, if she had been braver and less polite. She lives in Stratford-upon-Avon.

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