Snow fell thick on Cavendish Square that bitter December night in 1938, sealing Number 17 under a white shroud -- and trapping eight people with a killer.

Reginald Hargrove, tough-minded chairman of the Burma Exploration Company, expected a simple Christmas supper for his directors: toasts to steady shares and the vast Kyauktaung oil field promising half a billion barrels. But when the wives are snowbound elsewhere, the men turn to brandy and dangerous talk -- of river pollution, hidden contingency reports, and ambitions that could poison deltas and fortunes alike.

Then suave, ruthless Julian Blackwood steps out for cigarettes... and never returns.

He's found strangled in the cloakroom with his own crimson scarf, tied in a precise running bowline knot. A warm pearl button lies clutched in his dead hand like a planted clue. Three cigarettes line the rail above him -- a killer's taunt? Footprints vanish in the storm. Alibis fray.

In a house cut off from the world until dawn, Hargrove -- whose sharp eye once spotted disasters in Burmese rig logs and doctored ledgers -- must untangle the motives: a battlefield-scarred roughneck who knows knots too well? A vigilant engineer scarred by past rig horrors and ready to stop another poisoned river? An accountant whose books no longer balance? Or someone whose pride runs deeper than the Irrawaddy?

Drawing from my experience of the oil fields of Australia, the Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East -- where fortunes rose and fell on hidden faults -- The Crimson Scarf delivers a classic locked-room whodunit steeped in corporate greed, colonial shadows, and cold-blooded detection.

For fans of Agatha Christie's intricate puzzles and Arthur Conan Doyle's razor-sharp deduction, but grounded in the gritty reality of black gold and buried secrets.

Uncover the truth before the storm clears.

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• Crime, Thriller & MysteryMysteryHistorical
• Crime, Thriller & MysteryMysteryInternational Mystery & Crime

• Publication Date: January 23, 2026
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 231 Pages
• File Size: 962 KB