Murder & Mystery in the Welsh Hills with Nicola Upson

Join us for a special event celebrating Nicola Upson’s latest Josephine Tey mystery, "The Voices of the Dead." 

Inspired by the extraordinary true story of how the National Gallery hid its most valuable paintings in the slate mines of North Wales during the Second World War, this atmospheric novel brings together wartime London, the Welsh hills, hidden histories, and a 40yr old mystery buried deep within a close-knit community.  


The Voices Of The Dead:- A newly discovered grave in the Welsh hills delivers messages from the dead, in Nicola Upson's latest thrilling novel. Summer, 1941. As London is devastated by the Blitz, the National Gallery's most precious paintings find a new sanctuary in the slate mines of North Wales, supervised by Detective Chief Inspector Archie Penrose. Vacationing in the area is Josephine Tey, as well as Noel Coward who is preparing his defiant new play, Blithe Spirit, in which Margaret Rutherford plays a clairvoyant. When a woman's grave is discovered amid the debris of a roof fall in the mines, Archie and Josephine are plunged into a forty-year-old mystery, and a death that threatens to tear apart the close-knit Welsh community. Secrets begin to emerge, and no-one is immune to the voices of the dead. 

Nicola Upson was born in Suffolk and read English at Downing College, Cambridge. Her debut, An Expert in Murder, was the first in a series of crime novels to feature Josephine Tey – one of Britain’s finest Golden Age crime writers – and was dramatised for BBC Radio 4. Nicola is a member of the Detection Club, and several of her novels have been listed for the CWA Gold and Historical Daggers. Sorry for the Dead and The Christmas Clue were both Waterstones Thrillers of the Month