Johnny Under Ground by Patricia Moyes

Johnny Under Ground by Patricia Moyes Rating: ★★★★ Series: Inspector Henry Tibbet #6 Publication Date: January 31, 1965 Genre: mystery Pages: 253 Project: a century of women Emmy Tibbett was uneasy about attending her twentieth Royal Air Force reunion. Emmy had been a native nineteen year-old auxiliary officer at Dymfield Air Base during the war when she had fallen in love with the handsome hero pilot Beau Guest. She had been devasted when he committed suicide by deliberately crashing his plane into the North Sea. At the reunion Emmy was shocked to discover she had been the very last to see Guest alive. Even more disturbing was her discovery that everyone connected with the fatal flight had something to hide. Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett of Scotland Yard knew his wife had stumbled onto something sinister. But he couldn't keep her from investigating the past - not even when anonymous letters and a suspicious suicide made it clear someone meant to keep a nasty secret buried and wouldn't hesitate to kill.

My crazy pup chewed up my first paperback when I was at about 30%, so I had to get my hands on a new copy to finally find out whodunit.

I quite liked this entry in the series – much better than the prior book that I read, Falling Star. This one reaches back into Emmy Tibbitt’s past as a 19 year old member of the RAF auxiliary, long before she met and married Chief Inspector Henry Tibbets.

The book opens with a reunion of her old colleagues, in which she is convinced to participate in a book project where she and another of the old group are convinced to begin writing a book about Beau Geste, a famous pilot who is believed to have committed suicide by crashing into the sea in a bet with one of the other pilots. This stirs up some secrets that at least one of the old crowd would prefer to remain buried.

The mystery develops in two timelines, with flashbacks from Emmy. Emmy is one of my favorite series characters, so getting more of her backstory, as well as more interactions between her & Henry and her and all of those old colleagues was great. In addition, someone is trying to set Emmy up to take the fall, so Henry has to use his famous investigative skills to make sure they don’t succeed. The mystery itself was clever and the solution took me by surprise.