Goodreads meta-data is 321 pages, rated 4.16 by 167 litizens.
Genre: Krimi
Verdict: Masterful, again.
In the thirteenth instalment of this series David Brock has gone into an uneasy retirement, and his protégé Kathy Kolla has been promoted to Detective Chief Inspector. When Hampstead Heath becomes a killing field for the screenwriter’s old crutch, the serial killer, Kolla mobilises and strikes, arresting the unlikely but clearly implicated small-time publisher John Pettigrew who lives nearby. Forensic evidence points to him, as do witness statements.
Pettigrew’s brief entices Brock into acting as a private inquiry agent to see what can be seen. While Brock is reluctant, he finds Pettigrew convincing and he is bored in retirement so he begins to turn over stones before he realised Kolla was the officer in charge, leading him into conflict with her.
There are more twists and turns and after another murder forensic evidence and witness statements in this case now implicate Brock, who finds himself on remand. At first he treats confinement as a joke, then a mistake, then a respite, then he registers that it is not going to end. Angry as she is at Brock for sticking his nose in, Kolla is dead certain he is innocent and whips herself and her team into a frenzy to put it altogether piece by piece. Kolla seems to have outgrown her constant hormone attacks of earlier novels in the series. In these pages she concentrates on the job, not on feeling sorry for herself.
While the summary above may be conventional, the execution is so deft, so focussed, so speedy that the reader will not find it stale or clichéd. One of the nicest aspects of these books is the author does not find it necessary to create false tensions, e.g., by having an interfering and incompetent superior. Kolla’s boss wants results and works hard at making sure that happens. There are no stupid cops forgetting to lock doors, or smoking round the back while evidence disappears. If anything, these police are almost too good to be true, even the one who was ready to believe anything to get a result concludes it cannot be that easy.
Barry Maitland
The tension is in the master narrative and not distracting sidelines. And like the first entry in this stable, ‘The Marx Sisters’ (1994), discussed on an entry on my unlearned blog, at the heart of the mystery is a book, and what a book it is.