Sheri Cobb South Livres

Having resigned his position at Bow Street, John Pickett waits in vain for someone-anyone!-to engage his services as a private inquiry agent. As weeks go by with no responses to his newspaper advertisement, he has taken to spending his days wandering idly about London rather than admit his failure to his beloved wife Julia, the former Lady Fieldhurst.One day, while loitering amidst the crowds thronging the Covent Garden market, he wonders morosely if it might have been better had he not been born at all. Then he sees one of his former colleagues and, in an attempt to make a discreet exit, contrives instead to knock himself unconscious.He awakens to discover that his Bow Street colleague doesn't seem to remember him, and after staggering back home to Curzon Street, he finds someone else living in the house where he lived with Julia. But still greater surprises are in store for Pickett as he attempts to navigate his way through a world in which he never existed...With a wink and a nod to Frank Capra's classic film IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, NOWHERE MAN offers an alternate version of many of the earlier entries in the John Pickett mystery series.

Having resigned his position at Bow Street in disgrace (at least in his own mind) and failed in his attempt to establish himself as a private agent, John Pickett toils away at a tedious job as a clerk in the City. When he is approached by a man wishing to hire him to extract a young lady being held against her will at an asylum for opium-eaters, Pickett jumps at the chance to prove himself, and has a very reluctant Julia commit him to the institution as a patient. But nothing at the Larches is exactly as it seems, and while getting in may be easy, getting out may be another matter entirely...

Summoned to England's scenic Lake District by an anonymous letter, Bow Street Runner John Pickett and his wife, Julia, pose as a honeymooning couple, taking a room at the Hart and Hound as the letter instructs him. A midnight search of the inn's register identifies the innkeeper, Ned Hawkins, as his contact, but before Pickett can arrange a meeting, Hawkins is pushed from a cliff, surviving only long enough to utter one cryptic clue. To make matters worse, Julia saw it happen-and now she may be next on the killer's list.