‘Quick on the Draw’ by Susan Moody

Published by Severn House,
31 December 2019.
ISBN:978-1-84751-845-3 (PB)

An invitation to lunch from Sandro Grainger, he of the Botticelli angel looks, and a relation through her brother in-law to the extremely rich Grainger’s, former police detective Alex Quick is sure something is up.  As she succinctly puts it ‘I can’t kid myself that a twenty-five-year-old guy such as yourself would seek out a woman of my age if he didn’t have some kind of Agenda’. After a few false starts the story unfolds. While staying at his Uncle Cesare’s grand apartment in Venice Sandro threw a real grown-up dinner party to celebrate his birthday – private chef, black tie and all. Nine well-bred friends attended, except some valuable items went missing and one has turned up in a London pawnshop.  And said Sandro, my uncle can be ‘fierce’. 

Which? Asks Alex, of your well-bred friends do you suspect? I don’t know said Sandro sadly.  But can you talk to them and find out.

Eventually, the decision is that Sandro will arrange another party at his London flat and invite a few work colleagues, and all the same guests from the party in Venice and Alex can grill them, or words to that effect.  

So armed with a list of well-bred possible thieves – old school friends twins Harry and Jack Jago, Fabio Wisdom, a fashion designer in Milan, also a great friend of Katy Pasqualin who manages an art gallery in Kensington, Laura whose a model, Bianca Mondori (works in the City) and Sandro’s girlfriend Suzy Hartley Haywood and her brother Tony, Alex is all set….. although as she muses why would a wealthy member of the jet-set need to steal anything anyway?

Before Alex has got her investigations underway one of the original dinner guests is murdered and Alex makes plans to visit Venice the scene of the original crime.  But not before her neighbour Major Norman Horrocks, who has appeared in earlier books, has presented her with another problem one of epic proportions.   

As Alex pursues her investigations in Venice matters get murkier and murkier, when another of the original guests disappears and life gets very complicated. What seemed to be a straightforward bit of thieving is clearly something much deeper and darker, and with her friend Sam Willoughby currently visiting his brother Harry in New Zealand who can she trust.

Cleverly plotted, this intriguing mystery like the two previous ones in this series had me completely foxed.  Highly recommended.

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Reviewer: Lizzie Sirett 

 

Susan Moody was born in Oxford is the principal nom de plume of Susan Elizabeth Donaldson, née Horwood, a British novelist best known for her suspense novels. Susan Moody began writing crime novels with Penny Black, the first of the seven Penny Wanawake crime novels.  She has a second series of six books featuring bridge player Cassie Swan. In all, she has published 29 novels, most of them crime and suspense. Susan spent two years as a Creative Writing Tutor in Her Majesty's Prison, Bedford. She is a past Chairman of the Crime Writers' Association, serving in all as a CWA Committee member for seven years. She is a long-standing member of the prestigious Detection Club and served for three years as the President of the International Association of Crime Writers.  In 2016 Susan Moody began a new series featuring Alex Quick. Click the title to read a review of the first and second books in her Alex Quick series. Quick and the Dead and Quick off the Mark

http://susanmoody.co.uk

 

‘Their Final Moments’ by Jane Adams

Published by Joffe Books,
30 April 2019.
ISBN: 978-1-78931-104-4 (PB)

First published as two separate books:
Fade to Grey (1998)
and Final Frame (1999)

This is the third in the D.I. Mike Croft series published by Joffe Books previously published as two separate titles. 

Part One (1998). We know from the outset, indeed from the blurb on the book’s cover, that the killer is Jake Bowen. Not just a killer, either, but an artist who photographs the dying whom he has killed either in their final death agonies or in more aesthetic poses to form images of great beauty. All just as dead, however, and not only satisfying his lust to create beautiful art but commanding good prices in the darkest places of the internet.

Mike Croft of the Norwich police is initially drawn into this mesh of evil by a simple quest to find the perpetrator of a sexual attack on a young girl, Stacey Holmes, in a park. She escapes but is injured and hospitalised and so traumatised that she can remember nothing about the attack. There have in fact been a number of such attacks – are they linked?

At about the same time, on the other side of the country near the ancient monuments of Avebury Stone Circle and the Silbury Mound in Wiltshire, a young woman’s body is found in a burning car. This death is investigated by DCI Charlie Morrow and his team, based in Devises. She is identified as Marion O’Donnel.

A young man, out with his friends, becomes separated from them and is abducted by Jake.

A young girl, Sarah Phillips, accompanying her mother to an aerobics class is abducted. Her boyfriend Terry Ryan disappears, and his mother Judith is frantic.

Someone is writing to Tom Andrews on the local Norwich paper, The Chronicle, and taunting him with the failure to find the person responsible for these attacks. But forensic analysis indicates that there are not one but two attackers. So, are there two serial killers?

Mike’s old friend, former police officer John Tynan, calls on his friend, actress Theo Howard, only to find that she has died. Her death at first seems to be an accident but the post-mortem reveals it is not. And Davy Martin, her much younger lover, has disappeared.

What role is Max Harriman, childhood friend and great admirer of Jake Bowen, whose consciousness we enter into from time to time, playing? 

As Croft and Charlie Morrow and their respective teams begin their painstaking investigations, they start to discover links between these deaths, even the one in Wiktshire, and also involving Croft's lover, hospital psychiarist Maria and also leading to those who trade in pornographic and sadistic videos. Eventually Max, taken in by the police on grounds of suspicion of some of the attacks, lets slip the name of Jake Bowen. Can the police get to Bowen before there are more deaths? 

Part Two (1999). Although responsibility for many of the deaths including that of Theo Howard is established and Max Harriman is in prison and despite continued investigation by Mike Croft, there is no clue as to the whereabouts of Jake Bowen. But he is still active, and still seeking publicity. Two journalists on a West Country newspaper, after a tip-off, go to a wood where they find the body of a lovely young woman beautifully laid out. Horrifying enough. But when newspapers are sent photographs of the two journalists and their appalled expressions it becomes apparent that the journalists were themselves being spied on. Now it is the turn of Bristol and Avon police led by Chief Inspector Pearson to investigate, along with Croft and Morrow (who has been seriously injured in an explosion intended to kill him). But there is still no lead to Jake’s whereabouts who seems to be able to alter his identity and his appearance at will. And then Jake’s father Alastair contacts the police and Croft begins to understand how his father’s cold and unloving personality contributed to Jake’s evil personality. But at the same time, Bowen is threatening the family of DCI Pearson. And then, even worse for Mike Croft, there is a threat to Essie, the adored niece of Croft’s lover Maria.

I have not had the advantage of reading either of these books when individually published so I am not sure of how the narrative has been remodelled to take account of the restructuring. However, the weaving together of the various strands of the plot in Part One to make a highly complex but convincing plot. Part Two is a lot less complex but the introduction of Jake’s father provides a fascinating insight into such a flawed personality. Recommended.

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Reviewer: Radmila May

Jane Adams was born in Leicestershire, where she still lives. She has a degree in Sociology and has held a variety of jobs including lead vocalist in a folk-rock band. She enjoys pen and ink drawing; martial arts and her ambition is to travel the length of the Silk Road by motorbike. Her first book, The Greenway, was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey Award in 1995 and for the Author's Club Best First Novel Award. Jane writes several series.  Her first series featured Mike Croft. There are several books featuring DS Ray Flowers. Twelve titles featuring blind Naoimi Blake, and more recently seven books featuring Rina Martin. Her latest series is set in the 1920’s and features Chief Inspector Henry Johnson. Jane has also written three standalone novels. She is married with two children.

http://janeadams.wixsite.com/writer

Radmila May was born in the U.S. but has lived in the U.K. since she was seven apart from seven years in The Hague. She read law at university but did not go into practice. Instead she worked for many years for a firm of law publishers and still does occasional work for them including taking part in a substantial revision and updating of her late husband’s legal practitioners’ work on Criminal Evidence published late 2015. She has also contributed short stories with a distinctly criminal flavour to two of the Oxford Stories anthologies published by Oxpens Press – a third story is to be published shortly in another Oxford Stories anthology – and is now concentrating on her own writing.

‘Edgar Allan Poe and the Empire of the Dead’ by Karen Lee Street

Published by Point Blank,
11 October 2019.
ISBN: 978-1-78607-641-0 (PB) 

This is the third in this series featuring the real-life 19^th century American writer and poet, Edgar Allan Poe, as protagonist and Poe’s fictional detective, the French Chevalier August Dupin.

We go back in time to the death of Poe’s beloved wife Virginia (Sissy) and his deep grief. At this point he is in the United States but when he gets a letter from Dupin asking him to come to Paris for assistance in achieving justice against his ‘nemesis’, Ernest Valdemar who had been responsible for the deaths of Dupin’s grandparents on the scaffold during the French Revolution and for also his parents’ deaths. The letter also suggests that Poe bring documents that he has regarding his own enemy, George Reynolds, and enclosing tickets to cover the cost of the voyage. But when Poe gets to Paris he learns that the letter and tickets were not from Dupin. However, Dupin makes Poe welcome although Poe finds Dupin’s snappish housekeeper, Madame Morel, not easy to get on with. And there is something that Dupin wants to show Poe: how to get into the subterranean passages, relics of ancient mines, beneath Paris, this they do. They find an extraordinary place: endless winding corridors where the walls are lined with human skulls and bones in decorative patterns and boxes of silver and gold and jewellery have been hidden there for decades.

Dupin has also another activity for Poe to take part in: the Paris police have asked Dupin to assist in the search for a letter stolen from the literary salon of a Madame Legrand. This requires a visit by Dupin and Poe to the next literary meeting of the salon where they meet such literary luminaries as Georges Sand, Baudelaire and Eugene Sue. From there it’s only a step to a tavern, a real thieves’ den called the ‘Lapin Blanc’ run by one Mere Ponisse, an ‘ogress’ (a returned female convict), and Poe and Dupin become enmeshed in a fantastic tangle which includes the disappearance of, first, Madame Legrand, and secondly, Madame Morel. Not to mention the self-styled Grand Duke Berith, a magician and mesmerist – who is he? And a return to the subterranean depths of Paris’s Empire of the Dead.

This is, like the author’s two earlier books (see the Mystery People website for reviews), is extremely clever in the writing and the plotting. With its postmodern ironic playfulness and the intertextual weaving of Poe’s own life and Poe’s fiction, it is a highly intellectual contribution to crime fiction. And a great read as well. Recommended.

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Reviewer: Radmila May

Karen Lee Street was born in Philadelphia, but has lived in London for most of her adult life, and currently resides in Newcastle, Australia. She is the author of Writing and Selling Crime Film Screenplays (2013), short story collection Tattoos and Motorcycles, and Edgar Allan Poe and the London Monster (2016), the first in a Poe/ Dupin mystery trilogy. Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru will be published in May 2018. Karen has a PhD in Writing from the University of South Wales and has worked for many years in the European film industry.
www.karenleestreet.com 

twitter: @karenleestreet

Radmila May was born in the U.S. but has lived in the U.K. since she was seven apart from seven years in The Hague. She read law at university but did not go into practice. Instead she worked for many years for a firm of law publishers and still does occasional work for them including taking part in a substantial revision and updating of her late husband’s legal practitioners’ work on Criminal Evidence published late 2015. She has also contributed short stories with a distinctly criminal flavour to two of the Oxford Stories anthologies published by Oxpens Press – a third story is to be published shortly in another Oxford Stories anthology – and is now concentrating on her own writing.