David Smith

David Smith is a Warwickshire-born novelist whose fiction draws on British places, cultural history, and puzzles. Death in Leamington, published by Troubador in 2015, is set in Royal Leamington Spa and follows Inspector Hunter and DC Penny Dore after an elderly foreign visitor is attacked. What first appears to be a random incident opens into a layered investigation shaped by further deaths and vanishing leads. Smith incorporates the town’s Regency character, literary associations, folk heritage, and connections with composer Edward Elgar. Chapter titles echo musical directions, while references range from The Faerie Queene and The Scarlet Letter to Alice in Wonderland and Shakespeare’s Queen Mab. Death in Leamington therefore combines a police mystery with a celebration of local culture, asking the reader to notice patterns as carefully as the investigators do. It followed Smith’s first novel, Searching for Amber, and reflects his interest in stories where geography and inherited art are active parts of the puzzle rather than decorative background.