The Skipton Murders

About The Skipton Murders

A murder on stage. A killer in the wings. Can DCI Oldroyd unmask them before the final curtain?

It’s opening night for the Skipton Players, and their Victorian melodrama is going down a storm. But when the climactic hanging scene ends in a sickening silence, it’s clear something has gone terribly wrong. The safety rope has been switched – and actor Joe Hardy is dead, hanged in full view of a horrified audience.

DCI Jim Oldroyd is called in from Harrogate by his old colleague DI Bob Craven. The cast and crew all had access backstage, and Hardy was a man who made enemies easily. There’s a stage manager with a volatile history with the victim, a lighting technician who could barely hide his contempt, and a director who’d grown tired of Hardy’s grandstanding.

But which of them wanted him dead badly enough to kill him in front of a packed house? The case is made more complicated by a chilling connection. Ten years earlier, a teenager was found murdered and buried in a shallow grave in Skipton Castle Woods – and Hardy had been in a relationship with the girl’s mother at the time.

Now both mother and surviving daughter are part of tonight’s production. Two crimes. One town.

A decade apart. Can Oldroyd find the thread that connects them before the killer takes another bow?