The Daughter of Time

A hospital stay leaves Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant without an active case, but not without the habit of investigation. Friends bring him reference books and contemporary documents, allowing him to examine a mystery whose witnesses and suspects have been dead for centuries.

The question concerns King Richard III and the Princes in the Tower. Did Richard murder his nephews, as the familiar accusation claims? Grant approaches the story as a detective would approach disputed testimony, comparing accounts and asking which conclusions rest on evidence and which have hardened through repetition.

Because the inquiry unfolds from a hospital bed, research replaces pursuit. The tension comes from testing historical reputation against records that may have been selected, interpreted, or ignored by later narrators. Grant's police instincts turn chronology, motive, and reliability into investigative tools.

Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time joins a modern detective novel to a contested episode of English history. It asks readers to follow the construction of an argument without requiring chases or a contemporary crime scene. The result is a mystery about Richard III, but also about how certainty is manufactured and how an investigator can reopen a verdict long treated as settled.