REVIEWS

THE ANTIQUE HUNTER’S GUIDE TO MURDER . . . Between the covers

Think the beautiful county of Suffolk, with its stately churches and half-timbered villages. Think the timeless Stour and Deben valleys and their rivers, where the sun dapples the glinting water, much as it did when Constable immortalised the scene. Think antiques. Think crime and intrigue. Remind you of Sunday nights back in the day? It reminds me of the antics of Lovejoy and his friends, thirty years ago. However, this is rather different. We are in the present day, and the central character is Freya Lockwood, a skilled antique hunter who has fallen on hard times. Her former husband has let her keep their house until their daughter grew up, but now he wants it back and she is, to paraphrase the great Derek Raymond, rather like the crust on its uppers.

Freya’s background has elements of tragedy. As a schoolgirl, she was badly burned in the house fire that killed her parents, and she was brought up by her aunt Carole and began her working career as an assistant to antiques expert Arthur Crockleford. At some point they had a major falling out, and haven’t spoken in years. When Freya gets a ‘phone call from Carole to say that Arthur has been found dead in his shop, she ups sticks and travels down to Little Meddington where he had his shop.

The police have decided that Arthur’s demise is a simple case of an elderly man falling down the stairs, but then Freya and Carole are handed a letter addressed to them which begins:
“If you are holding this letter in your hands then it is over for me..”

Is there more to Arthur’s death than meets the eye? We know there is, because of the first few pages of the book, but Freya and Carole are in the dark after subsequently being told by a solicitor that the shop and its contents are now theirs. They begin to pick away at the mystery.

Arthur has arranged an antiques weekend to be held, in the event of his death, at Copthorne Manor a nearby minor stately home. He has invited several people connected with the antiques world to stay at the Manor, and it is as if he will be conducting the consequent opera like a maestro from beyond the grave.

We learn that the falling out between Freya and Arthur was a tragedy that occurred in Cairo many years earlier, Arthur and Freya were in Egypt ostensibly verifying and valuing certain items which were thought to have been stolen and were being traded on the antiques black market. Freya fell in love with a with a young Egyptian, Asim, whose family firm specialised in creating very cleverly faked antiquities. When a deal goes wrong, Asim is found dead, and Arthur sends Freya back to England. They have not spoken since, as Freya believes that Arthur was responsible for her lover’s death.

Now, back in Suffolk, at Copthorne Manor, some of the people involved in the Cairo incident are together again under the same roof, and in the vaults of the house are packing crates which contain some of the items which were central to Asim’s murder.

Everyone wants to get their hands on the precious items, but no-one is who they seem to be. The country house setting allows author Cara Miller to run through the full repertoire of Golden Age tropes, including thunderstorms, power cuts and corpses, and she has great fun as Freya and Carole eventually expose the villains.

Cara Miller (above) is the daughter of the late Judith Miller of Antiques Roadshow fame, so she certainly knows her stuff. The novel is a splendid mix of murder, mayhem and outrageous characters, and will delight those who love a good old fashioned mystery, with more than a hint of the Golden Age. It is published by Macmillan, and is available now.

March 17, 2024 0

TO KILL A SHADOW . . . Between the covers

There was a saying beloved of football managers and commentators that went something like, “He’s a whole-hearted player – he leaves nothing in the changing room.” The metaphor was meant to describe someone who gives – and here’s another cliché – “one hundred and ten percent” on the field. To Kill a Shadow is a bit like that. It has corrupt coppers, SAS types thundering about on motor bikes, a brave-but-flawed heroine, murders, torture, kidnap, a military-industrial conspiracy, ground-breaking neuro-technology and political chicanery. The central character is called Julia Castleton which is, confusingly, also the name of the author of the novel. Of Julia in the book, more later, but the author’s name is the nom-de-plume of what the end papers say is “an internationally best-selling and critically acclaimed writing duo”.

The book’s Julia is actually Julia Danby, the younger daughter of a millionaire businessman and man of influence. Marital fidelity was not his strong point, and while Julia’s mother was dying of cancer, he was off in the south of France with his latest girlfriend. This made Julia furious with her father. At the time, she had a proper job as a journalist with The Times, but the family conflict sent her completely off the rails, and she ended up – in no particular order – being sectioned under the Mental Health Act, losing her job, and becoming mother to a baby boy whose father – such was her mental disorder – remains unknown.

Now, she has somewhat recovered, and writes a political blog called The Castleton Files which seeks to expose fraud and deception. Spurning financial help from her father, from whom she is now estranged, she earns small change from advertisers on her blog, and people who choose to become subscribers. Living in a shabby flat, she tries to keep a roof over her head and that of her little boy, Alex.

When a former military medic who saw service in Iraq and Syria contacts her with what she sees as a breakthrough story, she puts the dossier – basically alleging that British arms manufactures made a fortune selling their goods to ISIS – online, and all hell breaks loose. Initially, hits on her website go through the roof and she is bombarded with requests from mainstream media for interviews and further information.

But – suddenly – it all goes pear-shaped. UK government strongly refutes Julia’s allegations, her history of chaotic mental health is made public but – worse still – many of the details in her dossier are shown to be palpably untrue. The people from Social Services are trying to prove she is not a fit mother to Alex, the police bust down the doors of her flat and then claim they have found Category ‘A’ images of child abuse on her laptop and, in a further descent into her mental hell, Julia starts self harming again, and gulps down her Tegretol – a drug used for controlling the effects of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Julia eventually discovers what the conspiracy is all about, and it is actually far more alarming than the story of the arms sales. The military medic had discovered something so fantastical and improbable, that were it to be true, the whole nature of warfare would be changed.

I didn’t find Julia a very sympathetic character. Keeping Alex is clearly important to her, but at the first nudge, she heads off with her mates – mostly ex-SAS – to various parts of the country, in order to chase down the latest lead. Meanwhile, the little boy is left in the care of her older sister Elaine, whose elegant lifestyle and bourgeois values Julia clearly disdains.

This reservation aside, I won’t lie. I read the book cover to cover with great enjoyment in a few sessions, and the action is relentless. Needless to say, Julia’s hunches are eventually proved to be solid fact, and her credibility as an investigative journalist is restored. To Kill a Shadow is published by Pendulum books and is available now.

March 7, 2024 0

THE SALT CUTTER . . . Between the covers

Ask ten different readers what they think qualifies as ‘noir’ and you will get ten different answers. Is it that everything is framed in a 1950s monochrome? Is it because all the participants behave badly towards each other, and have zero respect for themselves? Is it because we know that when we turn the final page, there will be no outcome that could be described as optimistic or redemptive? One quality, for me, has to be an unremitting sense of bleakness – both physical and moral – and this novel by CJ Howell (left) certainly has that.

Set in Bolivia, The Salt Cutter centres on a young soldier – he is never named – who has deserted, and is on the run, with only his military boots, a rucksack, and his disassembled M16 machine gun for company. It is November 1991, and The Soldier fetches up in the desolate town of Uyuni, on the edge of the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flats. Nowadays, there is something of a tourist industry but at the time when the book is set, the place was so bleak that even the rats had given up the ghost and moved elsewhere.

Along with a man called Hector Anaya, who had arrived with his family on the same ramshackle bus that brought him to Uyuni, The Soldier gets a job with a small crew cutting salt out on the flats, and he strikes up a cautious friendship with a woman called Maria, the town baker. He as also attracted a little follower, in the shape of a boy who makes a precarious living shining shoes.

The Soldier is expecting to be followed to Uyuni by his military masters, but why they would bother, for one random young man from an army of tens of thousands is not made clear. Two agents of the army do arrive and The Soldier kills them. The town’s policeman, El Gordo, has a realistic view of what law and order means in his town:

“Law? There is no law.”
El Gordo sucked at his cigarette between gasping breaths. ”
“There is money and there are guns. In a place like this, that isn’t much money, so the guns have the power. Here, the law is guns. Here, you are the law.”

The policeman knows that if the army come in force for The Soldier, they may exact a terrible price on the town, so the young man allows El Gordo to drive him a safe distance from the town, and he ends up in a remote settlement near a lithium mine.

At this point, the book takes an unusual narrative turn, as it jumps back in time – three days before we first meet The Soldier – and we are in a large city, presumably the capital La Paz, where Hector Anaya is a college lecturer. When two of his students are arrested by the army, he goes home, bundles his family and a few belongings into their car, and they drive off, putting as much distance between themselves and the city as possible. Eventually, hundreds of miles later, the car has pretty much been driven into the ground, which is how Hector, his wife and children, end up on the bus that brings The Soldier into Uyuni.

We then rejoin The Soldier, where he has the chance to board a bus which will take him even further from Uyuni but, instead, he gets a ride with a driver taking a tanker full of lithium brine to meet the railway at Uyuni. He finds that the army have indeed arrived, and the town, which was a bleak place before, now carries the stench of death.

Dead dogs lined the street. Strays, shut and then left to rot where they lay. Clumps of fur slowly peeled away by the wind. Sunken rib cages and smiles of death. Leathered gums shorn back high on the tooth. Fangs bared for eternity.

The conclusion of this powerful novel is all about sacrifice and redemption – of a sort. Throughout, the writing is vivid and visceral, sometimes literally so. The Soldier is both victim and creator of a brooding sense of darkness which lies over the landscape – already a savage place – like the smoke from a funeral pyre. The Salt Cutter is published by The Black Spring Press and is available now.

March 4, 2024 0

THE SCREAM OF SINS . . . Between the covers

Leeds, Autumn 1824. Simon Westow is engaged by a retired military man, Captain Holcomb, to recover some papers which have been stolen from his house. They concern the career of his father, a notoriously hard-line magistrate. Newcomers to the series may find this graphic helpful to establish who is who.

Westow takes the job, but is concerned when Holcomb refuses to reveal what might be in the missing papers, thus preventing the thief taker from narrowing down a list of suspects. As is often the case in this excellent series, what begins as case of simple theft turns much darker when murder raises its viler and misshapen head.

Jane, Westow’s sometime assistant, has taken a step back from the work as, under the kind attention of Catherine Shields, she is learning that there is a world outside the dark streets she used to inhabit. The lure of books and education is markedly different from the law of the knife, and a life spent lurking in shadowy alleys. Nevertheless, she agrees to come back to help Westow with his latest case, which has turned sour. When Westow, suspecting there is more to the case than meets the eye, refuses to continue looking for the missing documents, Holcomb threatens to sue him and ruin his reputation.

More or less by accident, Westow and Jane have uncovered a dreadful series of crimes which may connected to the Holcomb documents. Young girls – and it seems the younger the better – have been abducted for the pleasure of certain wealth and powerful ‘gentlemen’. Jane, galvanised by her own bitter memories of being sexually abused by her father, meets another youngster from the streets, Sally.

Sally is a mirror image of Jane in her younger days – street-smart, unafraid of violence, and an expert at wielding a viciously honed knife. Jane hesitates in recruiting the child to a way of life she wishes to move away from, but the men involved in the child abuse must be brought down, and Sally’s apparent innocence is a powerful weapon.

As ever in Nickson’s Leeds novels, whether they be these, the Victorian era Tom Harper stories, or those set in the 1940s and 50s, the city itself is a potent force in the narrative. The contrast between the grinding poverty of the underclass – barely surviving in their insanitary slums – and the growing wealth of the merchants and factory owners could not be starker. The paradox is not just a human one. The River Aire is the artery which keeps the city’s heart beating, but as it flows past the mills and factories, it is coloured by the poison they produce. Yet, at Kirkstall, where it passes the stately ruins of the Abbey it is still – at least in the 1820s – a pure stream home to trout and grayling. Just an hour’s walk from Westow’s beat, there are moors, larks high above, and air unsullied by sulphur and the smoke of foundry furnaces.

The scourge of paedophilia is not something regularly used as subject matter in crime fiction, perhaps because it is – and this is my personal view – if not the worst of all crimes, then at least as bad as murder. Yes, the victims that survive may still live and breathe, but their innocence has been ripped away and, in its place, has been implanted a mental and spiritual tumour for which there is no treatment. Two little girls are rescued by Westow, Jane and Sally and are restored to their parents, but what living nightmares await them in the years to come we will never know.

I have come to admire Nickson’s passion for his city and its history, and his skill at making characters live and breathe is second to none, but in this powerful and haunting novel he reminds us that we are only ever a couple of steps from the abyss. The Scream of Sins will be published by Severn House on 5th March.

March 1, 2024 0

LAYING OUT THE BONES . . . Between the covers

Kate Webb introduced us to DI Matt Lockyer and DC Gemma Broad in Stay Buried, which I read, reviewed and found most impressive. Briefly, Lockyer is a single man, son of Wiltshire farmers – who would be described as ‘hard-scrabble’ in America. His younger brother, Chris, was murdered in a street brawl a few years earlier. He is involved – at a distance – with Hedy Lambert, a woman whose murder conviction he helped overturn. She still served over a decade in prison.

Because of a previous professional misjudgment, Lockyer has been sidelined into cold-case crimes. One such is the death of Holly Gilbert who fell – or was pushed – from a bridge into the path of a an HGV. Now, the remains one of the men suspected as having being involved, and who disappeared shortly after, have been discovered on Salisbury Plain. Lee Geary was a giant of a man, superficially very scary with his height, skinhead hair and tattoos, but he was simple in mind and spirit and his criminal convictions were all for minor and non violent crimes.

Three other twenty-somethings who were suspected of being involved in the death of Holly’s death have all since died in ambiguous circumstances. Lockyer has much on his mind. His mother lies dangerously ill in hospital, infected by a Covid variant, while his father struggles to keep the farm going. Lockyer lives in – and is slowly renovating – an old cottage, but he discovers that something horrific happened within its walls decades ago and, as is often the case, the past can often rear its ugly head to disrupt the relative tranquility of the present. I’ll give you a teaser – the book’s title is shared with another of the same name. If you take the trouble to Google, you will discover a rather delicate and elegant connection.

In trying to find out the truth about Lee Geary’s death, Lockyer is drawn, as if pulled by a magnet, to Old Hat Farm. It is owned by Vincent and Trish O’Neill, who lead something of an alternative life. They are are almost archetypal ‘hippies’, with lives organised around the ancient festivals such as Samhain and Beltain. Fellow seekers after truth are welcome at the farm but, unfortunately all of the key residents had lives in the real world, and it is their misdeeds in their previous lives which make up the puzzle Lockyer and Broad have to solve.

The novel is lovingly set in a part of England that the the author clearly knows well, and Lockyer’s intimate connection with the landscape – the vastness of Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire’s ancient sites and old trackways – brings a literary sense of place that was deployed so well by Thomas Hardy, but has been used by more recent writers in the crime genre such as Jim Kelly and Phil Rickson. As locals will know, the ravages caused by military training are brutal scars on the old fields and byways, but they are what they are.

Laying Out The Bones is not just a superior police procedural novel, but a powerful evocation of how historic lies and misjudgments can return to plague those involved. The empathy between Lockyer and Broad is utterly convincing, as is the awareness of what happened to us all during the Covid outbreak. The book’s plot is intricate, but beautifully fashioned, and although Matt Lockyer has something of a shock in the last page, I am sure he will survive to feature in a future episode of his career story. Published by Quercus, this book is available now.

February 28, 2024 0

DEADLY ANIMALS . . . Between the covers

The district of Rubery, on the edge between Birmingham and Worcestershire. 1981. Ava Bonney is thirteen years old, She lives with her mum and sisters in a rudimentary council flat. Her dad has flown the coop, but mum Colleen has a feckless boyfriend, Trevor. Ava is an unusual girl. She is fascinated with animal physiology, and absorbs information mostly from books, but also – on the rare occasions when her fellow pupils are not being disruptive – from science lessons at school.

Ava is startlingly intelligent, but also wise enough to disguise herself as an ordinary teenager when needs must. She has an unusual hobby. She collects roadkill – mostly small mammals – and she takes them to secret sites close to her home, and installs them in little shrines. She secretly visits these special places as the remains decompose, and records her observations in a notebook. The largest specimen she has collected is a fox, but when she sneaks out one night to examine it, she has an unpleasant surprise. The smell of putrefaction is far more pungent than she would have expected, but the reason is obvious. Just a couple of yards from the dead fox is the body of a local schoolboy who went missing a couple of weeks earlier.

Not the least of Ava’s skills is a talent for mimicry, and she disguises her voice as that of a well educated middle-aged woman to make a 999 call, reporting what she has found. Another body is found, and then a third boy disappears. By this time, after interviewing local youngsters who knew the boys, Detective Sergeant Seth Delahaye has his suspicions that ‘Miss Misty’, the caller nicknamed after the anonymous woman in the 1971 Clint Eastwood film, is none other than Ava. Given the nature of the wounds inflicted on the boys the police are, despite common sense and experience, coming close to believing that they might be seeking a ‘what’ rather than a ‘who.’

Ava, with the help of her friend John, begins to put together a theory about what might be happening, and she believes that there is a connection to an elderly man – a former farmer and dog breeder – who is languishing in a care home with dementia. Delahaye, meanwhile, is receiving strange and disturbing reports of a large unidentified animal being seen at night in several places. As the police and Ava – in their different ways, close in on the killer, they realise that the truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

In Ava, Marie Tierney has created one of the most startling and original characters in modern crime fiction. I suppose she is a savant, but her gifts are not the result of her being on any kind of autism spectrum. She is super-smart, but also sensitive to the needs and natures of other people.

This is an astonishing novel on so many levels. It combines horror, compassion, dark humour, narrative verve, a deeply embedded empathy with landscape and locale and – above all – Ava Bonney, a truly memorable creation. Deadly Animals is published by Bonnier Books and is available now.

February 25, 2024 0

THE WINTER VISITOR . . . Between the covers

I wasn’t sure if I should tag this review as ‘historical crime fiction.’ The novel certainly takes us back to a 1991 England of Ford Sierras, four-star petrol, Spurs being managed by Terry Venables and captained by Gary Mabbutt. Perma-press slacks from C&A and – on the telly – the brief wonder that was BSKYB. We are in and around the town of Colchester in Essex, and we are in one of those winters where it always used to snow. I am sure that there is a doctorate waiting to be written on why Essex is perceived to Britain’s Crime Central. Perhaps it might be to do with the White House Farm murders in Tolleshunt D’Arcy, the ‘Essex Boys’ murder at Rettendon, or the exploits of double murderer James Fairweather in Colchester.

In The Winter Visitor, James Henry echoes his love of ornithology by using the term used for birds who fly to Britain during the winter – among them Redwings, Fieldfares, and both Bewick’s and Whooper Swans. I reviewed an earlier James Henry novel with an avian title, Whitethroat, back in 2020, and you can read the review here.

Two birds of very different feather are Detective Sergeants Daniel Kenton and Julian Brazier, based in Colchester. Kenton is married, bespectacled and fairly civilised:

“Daniel Kenton stared blankly into the hairdresser’s mirror. He did not care to see himself as others surely would: a a weary man, with murky red eyes, closing in on thirty five but aged beyond his years.”

Brazier, however, is frequently uncouth, ostensibly insensitive, and with the dress sense of someone preening himself in a Southend pound shop.

“Brazier was in a green bomber jacket and baggy black trousers like Charlie Chaplin, with white trainers poking out the bottom of them. Pegged trousers with turn-ups as well – on such short a leg as Brazier’s they were not at all flattering.”

As a pair, though, they are extremely effective. They need to be. James Henry has presented us with an extremely complex murder case.

Bruce Hopkins, an Essex criminal – not a major gangster, but more of a conman who dabbled in the drugs business – returns from the Spanish hideaway he shares with many other dodgy British expats, but it is a huge mistake. He is kidnapped, shoved into the boot of a Sierra (what else) which is rolled into a reservoir. When the car and body are discovered Kenton and Brazier are assigned to the case, and it is a complex one.

Hopkins did not have a criminal history likely to provoke Mafia-style revenge, so there seems to be no point in rounding up ‘the usual suspects’. Even so, Kenton is despatched to Marbella to interview former Essex bad boys, but he returns literally clueless. There is also a current investigation into an arson attack on a local church, and it is that Kenton and Brazier get the first hint of a breakthrough when they begin to suspect that Hopkins’s death may be linked to a small preparatory school called Bryde Park and some of its former staff and pupils.

James Henry is a very good writer. He captures the period perfectly, and his appreciation of the nature of Essex’s relationship with London is acute:

“Billericay, South Essex. Home of the East Ender made good. Traders, jobbers, grafters on the stock market. Leave school in May at fifteen, straight on the train into Liverpool Street towards plum jobs with brokers in the city, pulling in wedge before their smarter ‘O’ Level classmates finish in the exam hall.”

Kenton and Brazier have to visit an old fashioned mental hospital in the course of the investigation, and Henry captures its menace:

“…the institution itself had teetered on the fringe of an archaic medical world best forgotten. At the forefront of experimental medicine in the fifties, the place was synonymous with lobotomies, padded cells, terrifying screams, and all the nightmares associated with the restraint of insanity.”

We are lead this way and that as we share the detectives’ struggles to make sense of the death of Bruce Hopkins. The solution is as unexpected as it is elegant, and this is superior crime fiction. Published by Riverrun/Quercus, it is available now.

February 20, 2024 0

THE SHADOW NETWORK . . . Between the covers

Suspected war criminal Hannibal Strauss, a mercenary suspected of war crimes in Libya, Cambodia and elsewhere, is in custody near The Hague awaiting trial before the International *Criminal Court. The wheels of international war crimes justice grind extremely slowly, and as lawyers jostle for position, there is a terrorist outrage in the Netherlands capital. Gunmen open fire on a crowded square, the Grote Markt, killing not only individuals connected with the impending court case, but dozens of random civilians, too. One man involved in the Strauss case, Kon Frankowski, escapes and goes on the run.

*Factual note: the International Criminal Court (ICC) is separate and different from the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICJ is part of the United Nations, and investigates countries. The ICC investigates individuals, and is recognised by some – but not all – countries, a notable exception being Russia. Very few people have been convicted and jailed by the ICC, one being Charles Taylor, the former leader of Liberia. A third and unconnected organisation, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, did convict and jail Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, while Slobodan Milošević died while his trial was in progress.

The mastermind behind the slaughter is an International terrorist known only as The Monk. His organisation has its roots in a pro-Tsarist resistance movement known as the Mladorossi. It has evolved over the decades, but remains a massive threat to international security.

Answering the call to investigate the Grote Markt massacre are Joe Dempsey, and agent with the (fictional) International Security Bureau, and his partner, criminal barrister Michael Devlin. They seem an unlikely pairing, to be honest. Dempsey is Special Forces trained, has killed many men in the course of his job, while Devlin is undoubtedly clever, but I’m not sure what his interlocutory skill brings to the table outside of the interview room. Hey ho, though, it’s a novel, so let’s run with it.

The reason why Frankowski is at the centre of this is that he was money-launderer-in-chief to Hannibal Strauss, and the Hungarian mercenary has entrusted Frankowski with a list of all Russian Mladorossi agents and how they are embedded across the world. This list – in the right/wrong – hands would almost certainly be the end for The Monk and his machinations. Joe Dempsey, however, has a rather delicate personal connection to Frankowski. Frankowski’s wife Maria is the former lover of Dempsey, who reluctantly ended the relationship because of the danger his work would bring to them if they became a family.

While Dempsey and Devlin are on the ground in the Netherlands, Agent Eden Grace – Dempsey’s ISB protégé, is handling things in America, and it is there that Maria Frankowski and her children have gone into hiding, as they have become an pawns in the violent chess game which seeks to find Kon Frankowski and the fatal list.

In all good spy thrillers, we must never take the author’s word that people are who we are told they are, and The Shadow Network is no exception.The Monk is hiding in plain sight, and neither we – nor Dempsey and Devlin – have a clue as to who he really is. This is a thoroughly entertaining thriller with fight scenes so real that just reading them may necessitate a visit to A & E with sympathetic wounds and trauma. It is published by Elliot and Thompson and will available on 15th February. Tony Kent, by the way, is that most unusual of pairings – a criminal barrister and heavyweight boxer. Cross him at your peril!

February 14, 2024 0

THE GHOST ORCHID . . . Between the covers

I suppose in the kingdom of detective partnerships, Holmes and Watson will never be dethroned, and quite rightly, too. I would however nominate (alongside Rizzoli and Isles, Morse and Lewis, Bryant and May, Wolfe and Goodwin) Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis. Jonathan Kellerman’s duo of a child psychologist and LA homicide cop have for me, in dozens of novels, never failed to deliver. Yes, there’s a formula at work here, but that’s what makes all these partnerships work. Sturgis is abrasive, socially insecure and, because of his homosexuality, fighting an endless battle against his censorious LAPD colleagues, but he is a brilliant investigator: add into the mix Delaware’s social awareness, acutely attuned antennae for people telling lies, and you have a winning mix.

A glamorous woman and a younger man are found shot dead at a Bel Air property. Her expensive jewellery has not been taken, and it looks like a professional job. Sturgis asks Delaware to take a look at the crime scene*.

*For new readers who wonder why Delaware is brought into the case, it’s simple. It’s the way the books work. Sturgis is something of a maverick, loose-cannon, lone-wolf – choose your own metaphor- and as long as he does the business, his colleagues leave him alone, so he always welcomes the extra pair of eyes and psychological insight that Delaware brings. In case you were wondering, Delaware earns a good living as a court-acknowledged expert in legal cases involving children so, thankfully for fans like me, he can afford the time to help Sturgis.

It transpires the dead woman is Meagin March, whose husband Doug is a real estate billionaire, and the corpse alongside hers belonged to, as they say, her toy-boy. Not short of a cent or three himself, Giovanni Aggiunta is the errant younger scion of a top draw Italian shoe making firm. He receives a generous allowance to amuse himself while his older brother and other family continue creating wealth with their exclusive designer footwear. is not all she seems to have been, however, and it turns out that in a previous life she was a Vegas glamour escort. Yes, she finally snared Mr Right – and a life of luxury – but Delaware and Sturgis can find no-one who has a bad word to say about the murdered lovers, but become convinced that the woman was the intended target, and that her Italian lover was, sadly, collateral damage.

Doug March is a thoroughly unpleasant fellow. He was away on a business trip at the time, so it wasn’t his finger on the trigger of the .38 revolver, but could he have been so angry at Meagin that he hired a contract killer? Delaware is convinced that there is a message waiting to be discovered in one of the rooms of the March’s mansion. Meagin was an amateur artist and the room was her studio. All but one of her paintings are unremarkable ‘chocolate box’ scenes, but the exception seems to be a particularly severe abstract. Eventually, Delaware’s live-in romantic interest, Robin, identifies as a painting of a strange and rare flower, known as a ghost orchid*.

*Dendrophylax lindenii, the ghost orchid (a common name also used for Epipogium aphyllum) is a rare perennial epiphyte from the orchid family. It is native to Florida, the Bahamas, and Cuba. Other common names include palm polly and white frog orchid.

Robin provides more insight by suggesting that Delaware and Sturgis take a look at the unusual spelling of the dead woman’s name. I won’t say any more, but it’s not too hard an anagram to solve. These fresh clues result into a deep dive into ‘Meagin’s’ childhood which reveals horrors hitherto unsuspected. Delaware and Sturgis finally get their killer, but not quite in the way they were expecting. This is another classy and absorbing tale from the casebook of one of modern crime fiction’s most endearing partnerships. It is published by Century/Penguin Random House and will be out on 15th February.

February 11, 2024 0