A Killing of Innocents, by Deborah Crombie

This book is published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. I was very glad to see that the HarperCollins workers' union (Local 2110 UAW) reached an agreement with the publisher this week after more than three months on strike. The union did not ask people to boycott HarperCollins books, but many readers refused to review or publicize HC books in solidarity. This was the first HC book I've had to write about since getting back to blogging.

This is the 19th book in Deborah Crombie's long-running series of police procedurals, featuring married police officers Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid. In the early books, Gemma was part of Duncan's team at Scotland Yard. As their relationship became personal, they kept it secret until Gemma earned a promotion and moved to her own team. In later books their cases often overlap, or one or the other finds a reason to get involved.

The previous book, A Bitter Feast, was published back in 2019, and I had started to wonder if it might be the last. I was very pleasantly surprised to see a new book announced for April of this year, and it immediately went on my "52 books" list. It was an even bigger surprise when the publication was moved up to early February. I had started re-reading some of the more recent books in the series, since it's been a good while, and I'm glad I started with A Bitter Feast, because I didn't have as much time for re-reading as I'd planned!

A Killing of Innocents takes place a few months after the last book, so before COVID. It's apparently set in 2018, since there is a reference to Lin-Manuel Miranda in "Mary Poppins Returns." In such a long-running series, with the first published in 1993, I don't think that Deborah Crombie is tying the books to a current timeline.

The story opens in London with the death of a young doctor in training, Sasha Johnson. She is stabbed one evening while walking through a crowded Russell Square, and the only one who even notices her fall to the ground is a five-year-old boy. The case falls to Duncan and his team out of the Holborn station. As always, the story has a real sense of place, with a beautifully detailed map of the area of the investigations. Running parallel with the investigations are side stories with Duncan's team, particularly his sergeant Doug, Gemma and her sergeant Melody, and Gemma and Duncan's blended family of three children, and their family and friends. It was lovely to meet these characters again and to catch up with their lives, but I could see it might be a little confusing to a new reader. There are also new characters to follow, particularly Duncan's team in Holborn, with sections written from their points of view. It does take the focus of Gemma and Duncan, though they remain central to the story.

While the mystery is resolved very neatly, the story ended with two minor cliffhangers, for Duncan and Gemma and also for Melody. This isn't the first time Deborah Crombie has done this. I remember that the last page of The Sound of Broken Glass had me quickly flipping through the blank end pages, unable to believe that there wasn't more. The cliffhangers here give me hope that Deborah Crombie has another book in mind.

N.B. This was book #4 in my "52 books for 2023", and well worth a place.

A trio of thrillers

I read three books in a row last week that would be shelved in the mystery section of the bookstore, but they were more novels of suspense than traditional whodunits.  They had little in common, in terms of plot and setting, but they were all three great fun to read.

A River in the Sky, Elizabeth Peters

Published in 2010, this is Elizabeth Peters' last book.  It features her most popular characters, Amelia Peabody and her husband Radcliffe Emerson, as well as the usual supporting cast of their son Ramses and adopted daughter Nefret, their young friend David, the inquisitive butler Gargery, and Egyptian assistants Daoud and Selim.  Unusually for a Peters book, though, there is only one cat, who makes just a single cameo appearance.  The setting is also unusual: rather than working in Egypt, the Emersons are drawn to Palestine, where Ramses is already working on a dig in Samaria.  Since Emerson has been banned from excavating in Egypt, he and Amelia are at something of a loose end when they are approached by a Major Morley, who claims to have an ancient scroll that reveals the location of the lost Ark of the Covenant.  He intends to travel to Jerusalem and find it (the theme song from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" immediately began playing in my head).  Though Emerson all but throws him bodily out, at the request of His Majesty's government he later agrees to follow Morley to Palestine and keep an eye on him.  Meanwhile, Ramses stumbles upon evidence that the German government might be trying to stir up trouble for the British in the area.  I thought this was a really fun read, with Amelia in particularly fine form.  Though the last book written, it is set earlier in the series, in 1911.  Elizabeth Peters had begun filling in some of the gap years with her last books (as Laurie R. King is doing with her next Russell and Holmes book).  This one is set just before the big Romantic Drama with Ramses and Nefret takes center stage - a storyline I find a bit tedious, while fully appreciating Ramses as the Romantic Hero.  I'm glad there were only hints of it here.  I still have one more of the Emerson books to read, Guardian of the Horizon.  I've been putting it off because it's a return to the setting of The Last Camel Died at Noon, Peters' homage to H. Rider Haggard, which with all due respect to one of my favorite authors, I find a little silly.


To Dwell in Darkness, Deborah Crombie

It has been a long nineteen months since Deborah Crombie left us with an awful cliff-hanger on the last page of The Sound of Broken Glass. I had the pleasure of hearing her speak last Friday at Murder by the Book. I had just finished this new one earlier in the day, in case she left us hanging like that again. Which she does, but I found the ending here less frustrating.  (Ms. Crombie seemed disappointed when I told her that.)  This story revolves around London's St Pancras Station (in her talk, Ms. Crombie mentioned that she is having a love affair with Victorian architecture). Duncan Kincaid, formerly of Scotland Yard, has been transferred and effectively demoted, without explanation, to head a murder investigation team out of Holborn Police Station.  When a group of eco-protesters, intending to set off a smoke bomb in St Pancras, instead sets off a white-phosphorous bomb, killing the young man holding it, the case lands on Duncan's desk.  As he and his team investigate, they find that the protest group is not exactly what it seems, particularly one member, who in the wake of the incident has disappeared.  Meanwhile, Duncan's former sergeant Gemma, now his wife and an  officer herself, is tracking a young woman's killer.  But her own sergeant, Melody Talbot, who was present when the bomb went off, is drawn more into helping Duncan with his case.  Here also I enjoyed meeting these characters again, they feel like old friends.  While Gemma's case is a traditional police procedural, Duncan's felt more like a thriller, and with the terrorist element, very much of the moment.  It also links to the previous two stories in intriguing and rather disturbing ways.  On the other hand, the book does feature a litter of adorable kittens (though at one point, I was distinctly uneasy about their fate).  I really hope it won't be eighteen months before the next book.


The Traveller Returns, Patricia Wentworth

How appropriate that my Hodder re-print of this book has a quote from Mary Stewart, though "Very well written" isn't the most exciting blurb.  Reading this, I was instantly reminded of The Ivy Tree.  The book opens with Anne Jocelyn returning to England in mid-1944.  Everyone thought she was dead, shot on a beach in Brittany as her husband Philip tried to rescue her by boat from the advancing Nazis.  Philip brought the body of his wife home and buried her.  Now Anne arrives, insisting that in the confusion of the evacuation he made a mistake: it was her cousin Annie Joyce who was shot, while she was left behind to face the Germans.  Her cousin Lyndall and Aunt Milly stifle their doubts and welcome her home.  Philip however refuses to accept her.  I admit, in the first three chapters, I changed my mind about Anne four times.  I wasn't the only one, though an old friend of Annie Joyce is sure that she would know the difference between the two.  That old friend, Nellie Collins, meets Miss Maud Silver on a train up to London, and tells her the whole story.  When Miss Collins is later found dead from an apparent road accident, Miss Silver calls the police.  Meanwhile, Lyndall follows Anne into a beauty shop and overhears some very disturbing words, which she eventually brings to Miss Silver.  Ensconced in her cozy sitting room with her knitting, Miss Silver still manages to stay one step ahead of the police, though the plodding Chief Detective Lamb ignores her suggestions and scoffs at her deductions - until she is proved right, and then he claims all the credit.  His sergeant Frank Abbott, an old friend of Miss Silver's, is smarter than his boss and will probably go further.  So far I've read three books with Miss Silver, all set during the Second World War.  By my count, there are twenty-four more, and I can easily see myself collecting them all (I already have two more on the TBR stacks).  They may tend toward the cozy side, but Miss Silver is one tough cookie, and those who do evil tend to get what is coming to them. She sees herself as an agent for justice, "which she would certainly have spelt with a capital letter."  But she isn't self-righteous or pious about it, she just gets on with the job at hand.

Death in Crystal Palace

The Sound of Broken Glass, Deborah Crombie

Two weeks ago, I got to go to the launch party for Deborah Crombie's new book, held at my beloved Murder by the Book here in Houston.  It was exciting!  We don't get many launch parties in Houston - this was my first.  I've had the pleasure of meeting Deborah Crombie at other signings, and she is always so gracious, entertaining, and funny.  Since the book was just released that day, she was very careful in what she said about it, to avoid any spoilers.  I imagine later audiences, who have had a chance to read the book, might have something to say about the incredible cliff-hanger that she springs on us in literally the last line of the book.  Even though that line comes in the middle of the page, followed by half a page of blank space, I couldn't help turning the page, just in case there was some coda, some afterword, some resolution.

And then I remembered Deborah Crombie telling us that she has just signed a new contract, under which the publication of the next book will be pushed back further into next year.  There was a distinct murmur of disappointment from the audience at that news, greedy readers that we are.  But I think it would have been a lot more vehement had we realized what is left unanswered in this one.

The Sound of Broken Glass is the 15th book in her series featuring London police officers Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James.  When the series started, Duncan was a newly-minted Detective Superintendent at Scotland Yard and Gemma his sergeant.  Their professional relationship slipped over the line into a personal one, which they had to keep hidden until Gemma earned a promotion and transfer to the Metropolitan Police.  They are now married, with a blended family, each having brought a son from previous relationships, and together they are fostering a little girl, orphaned in an earlier case they worked.  They have extended family and friends who move through their lives, and sometimes their cases.  There are also work colleagues, like Duncan's sergeant Doug and Gemma's Melody, who have become part of their family.

I always enjoy the mysteries in these books, which are well-written, carefully-plotted and crafty.  They play out partly as police procedurals.  In the later books, after Gemma left the Yard, she and Duncan rarely work cases together, at least not officially.  But if the case is Gemma's, then Duncan usually finds his way into it, and vice versa.  In this new book, Duncan has been on family leave, caring for their foster daughter.  When her earlier turn ended, Gemma accepted a promotion and transfer to a murder team in South London.  Here she is investigating the death of a barrister, found naked and hog-tied in a seedy hotel in Crystal Palace.  Setting out to discover how he ended up there, she and Melody discover a connection with a local musician, who played a gig at a nearby pub the night of the murder.  Andy, the guitarist, was a witness in one of Duncan's previous cases, which gives him an opening into the case (and a break from child-minding).

I was interested in the setting for this book.  Of course I was familiar with the historic Crystal Palace, but not with its namesake area of South London, where much of the action takes place.  Previous books have been set in Cheshire and Yorkshire, Glastonbury and Henley, and the Scottish Highlands, as well as the Isle of Dogs and Southwark in London.  The American editions include wonderful illustrated maps by Laura Hartman Maestro that help bring the settings to life. 

Even more than the plots and the settings, it is the characters who draw me back to these books.  A new book does feel like meeting old friends again, particularly Duncan and Gemma.  From the start, they made a good team, and I've enjoyed watching their relationship develop over the course of the series.  It's because Deborah Crombie has made me care about these people over the course of fifteen books that the last line of this one left me so gobsmacked.  And when the TBR challenge is over, I think I'll be reading through the series again.

Death on the river

No Mark Upon Her, Deborah Crombie

It has been a long wait for this book, the 14th in her series featuring police detectives Duncan Kinkaid and Gemma James.  The last book, Necessary as Blood, was published in September 2009.  It will be an even longer wait for the American edition of this new book, which won't be released until February 2012.  I was going to be good and wait for it, until I saw an email from Murder by the Book announcing that they had the U.K. edition for sale.  I was therefore able to buy local, support my favorite indie bookstore, and still get to read the book six months earlier than expected - a winning situation all around.  From the comments I've seen on Deborah Crombie's blog, quite a few U.S. readers already have the book.  I hope that her American publishers take note of this.

I found this series a few years ago at the library.  I was wandering through the mystery section, and the cover of Now May You Weep caught my eye.  I took it home and started reading it straight off.  Almost immediately I knew I wanted to read the earlier books (it is 9th in the series), which were luckily all in paperback by that point.  So I had the excitement of reading through the series, and then the impatience of waiting for the next book.

The series centers, in every way, on Duncan and Gemma.  They originally worked together at Scotland Yard, where Duncan is a Detective Superintendent and Gemma was his sergeant.  As their working relationship developed it became personal and complicated, in part because of the need to keep it secret.  Only when Gemma was promoted to inspector and moved to another assignment were they able to make the relationship public. Though they are now in different divisions, cases frequently bring them together professionally.  They both have sons from previous marriages, and in the last book they took in a foster child, part of the case they were working involving immigrants in London's East End.  Their personal life remains complicated, by past history and by their demanding jobs, but they have built a true partnership and a family.  They are both appealing, interesting characters, who feel very true to life.

No Mark Upon Her takes place in and around Henley, where rowers are training for the Olympic trials.  Among them is Becca Meredith, who goes out alone one evening in her scull and does not return.  It is only after her body is discovered and he has been assigned to the case that Duncan learns that she was also a fellow police officer.  Is her death related to her rowing, to her police work, or to her personal life?  When Duncan discovers that Becca had accused a senior officer of sexual assault, that the case was hushed up, but that there might be other victims, Gemma is drawn to investigate that angle, though unofficially since she is on family leave to care for their new daughter.  This is a complex story, with a large cast of characters and several red herrings, which builds to an explosive conclusion.  The ending of the book is a bit ambiguous, though, as Duncan prepares to take his turn on family leave, while Gemma is offered a promotion.  The next book should be an interesting one, and I'm already looking forward to it.