Recommended for krimieologists.
This title is the first in a continuing series featuring Chief Inspector David Brock and Sergeant Kathy Kolla. It is assured and has a light touch though the subject is murder.
The sisters are indeed distant relatives of Eleanor Marx (wife of Karl) and that figures in the plot in several ways.
There are many blue herrings, as Hercule Poirot says when the English idiom fails him, from a son eager for an inheritance, a developer who wants to build a giant building, an angry neighbor. Perhaps the dominant character is a place, Jerusalem Lane where the sisters live. It is marvelously invoked, though my London A to Z does not list it, more’s the pity.
The police make mistakes and pursue some of those blue herrings. Even the inscrutable Brock sometimes blunders. Fallibility appeals to me.
There is a delicious portrait of a solipsistic and unscrupulous scholar who reminded me of some I have known.
This first volume in the series is mercifully free of Kolla’s endless capacity for self-pity that I find distasteful in the latter volumes, though the seeds are there. Too often Kolla’s main interest is Kolla. No doubt some readers find her incessant self-doubts and uncertainties attractive but they are too narcissistic for this reader.
For more information go to:
http://www.barrymaitland.com/index.html
Personal note. Like many others, when I first used the Reading Room at the British Museum I sat in the seat Karl Marx habitually used.
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