The Sinful Stones (The Seals)

The third of six novels with Detective James Pibble

About the book

James Pibble has been summoned to a remote Scottish island by his long-dead father’s ex-employer, the semi-senile Nobel Prize-winner, Sir Francis Francis. Before long, he finds himself attempting to extract Sir Francis from the grip of a crazed millenarian sect which seems determined to keep him there. It seems they will stop at nothing to make sure he stays. Including murder…

Reviews

Fantastically inventive…a story full of imaginative detail with a stirring, sardonic end. Daily Telegraph

Here is that rare bird among thrillers: one that combines sheer speed and subtlety, through sheer writing skill. Sun

A delight to read. Times Literary Supplement

Splendid. The Times

So richly contoured as to demand comparison with the best contemporary fiction. Scotsman

Peter Dickinson is a master of the bizarre...The Sinful Stones is bewildering and yet believable, marvelously mad but perfectly logical...I had an unusually good, and often gripping, time with it. Louis Untermeyer

This Scottish yarn is like a lightweight, well woven, expertly tailored Harris tweed. To scramble metaphors, the cunning mechanism of the plot purrs like a Rolls, and the writing is luscious thick Devon cream. There's been nothing like it in British mystery fiction since Michael Innes and Edmund Crispin. New Republic

Publishers

Hodder & Stoughton, UK - 1970

Harper & Row, US - 1970

Panther, UK - 1972

Hamlyn, UK - 1983

Mysterious Press, UK - 1988

International Polygonics Ltd, US - 1991

Open Road, US - 2015