‘The Shrine’ by Lesley Thomson

Published by Head of Zeus,
12 March 2026.
ISBN: 978-1-03592024-2 (HB)

When an author creates interesting characters who belong to a world outside her familiar series, sooner or later they're going to turn up in that series. And that's exactly what has happened in Lesley Thomson's latest foray into the world of the Detective's Daughter. Stella Darnell, whose nickname emanates from the fact that she's exactly that, prefers cleaning other people's houses to solving crimes, but that doesn't stop the dead bodies from turning up wherever she goes.

 This time she's in a campervan on a campsite in the Cotswolds, trying to sort out her feelings after a rift with her train driver partner Jack, over his attempts to contact his long-dead mother through a medium. In a cottage in the nearby village are a couple of those interesting characters from other books (and incidentally, other parts of the country). Mobile fishmonger Freddy Power is covering for a colleague's holiday, and D I Toni Kemp is on holiday herself. 

And inevitably, Stella stumbles across a body. She's out with Freddy on her fish-selling round, and they pass, or rather don't pass, a shrine to a popular teacher killed decades ago in a hit-and-run accident. The teacher's body is safe in the cemetery, but a much more recent one is propped up at the shrine: an unpopular builder and conman. It's the mixture as before for reluctant sleuth Stella. 

Equally inevitably, who should turn up at the campsite but Jack, in the company of Lucie May, their investigative journalist friend, who, conveniently for them both, lives in a large motorhome. Between the five of them, they set out to unravel the knottiest of tangled webs. Not only is there a murder to solve (the local police don't appear to be up to the job); the mystery of the long-ago hit-and-run has to be resolved, Stella has to resolve her differences with Jack, and Lucie May has to file a suitably dramatic story. 

Also in the village, and somehow involved, are Amanda Proudie, daughter of a notorious medium who is nominally dead but still around in spirit despite her elaborate grave in the village cemetery, and Jane Cato, a retired pharmacist who has her own agenda. And an old flame, or possibly adversary, of Stella's is lurking in the background. 

It all comes to a satisfactory conclusion, of course; it always does in fiction. And it does it with Lesley Thomson's sure hand on the tiller, creating a wealth of characters you'd recognize if you met them, locations you could step into, and situations and misdirection’s that will keep you guessing right to the final page. Stella, Jack, Lucie and their partners in crime-solving will feel like old friends by the end of the book. Not that you'll want it to end, at least not till the next one is there to replace it.
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick 

Lesley Thomson was born in 1958 and brought up in Hammersmith, West London. She went to Holland Park Comprehensive and graduated from Brighton University in 1981 and moved to Sydney, Australia. Returning to London she did several jobs to support writing. Her novel A Kind of Vanishing won The People's Book Prize in 2010. In 2013 her first book in The Detective’s Daughter series was published, featuring Stella Darnell (MD of Clean Slate Cleaning Services) and Jack Harmon, driver on London Underground’s District Line. There are now nine books in the series.  Lesley combines writing with teaching creative writing at West Dean College. She lives in Lewes with her partner.

 

www.lesleythomson.co.uk/

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.