A Cockpit of Roses Author:James FRASER By the side of the Manor's long graveled drive was what formerly had been a cock-fighting pit, now a carefully tended garden of prize roses. Eight feet deep, thirty feet in diameter, at night the cock-pit of roses filled with shadows black as ink, and smelled like death. The morning after a gala dinner party, Inspector Bill Aveyard is found asle... more »ep in a drunken stupor, his fly undone, and near him in the cock-pit the body of a young girl who appears to have been raped and suffocated. Inspector Aveyard is cast once again into the intimate lives of the inhabitants of a small Midlands village, Mrs. Marchmont owns the Manor but has few friends, Nancy Ogle weighs 400 pounds and never leaves her cottage, May Wilson, 25 and gorgeous, isn't getting all she wants out of her marriage, and old hatreds seethe close to the surface in unexpected quarters. Then, there's the matter of the roses and the man who, by not knowing how to prune them, alerts the technical department of the Birton police force. Theft, rape, accidental death, murder, and suicide, but which crime belongs to which criminal, and which victim? That's the problem confronting Bill Aveyard in this sequel to "The Evergreen Death"« less