From Publishers Weekly
From her London roof garden, the lonely young daughter of a popular romance writer watches the apartment building across the street, keeping an eye on the window where she sometimes sees a Filipina maid whom she calls the Princess of the Pavement People. One day she sees two men struggling in the apartment. Later she meets the "Princess," injured and confused, in the park and takes her to hide in the roof garden shed. Detective Superintendent George Macrae and Detective Sergeant Leopold Silver, tracing a rash of antique thefts in the area, discover the battered body of the maid's employer, an Arab, in the apartment, and they embark on yet another of Scholefield's ( Never Die in January ) spare and remarkably vibrant procedurals. The burly, often-married Macrae adjusts as two of his estranged kids come to live with him and his current love, a kindhearted and long-suffering tart, while Silver's quest for the yuppie dream continually is derailed by his weird relatives and those of his love, Zoe. Finally concentrating on the murder, the duo finds a case full of loose ends: an abused woman living in near slavery, a child with a keen eye and a wild imagination and a homosexual triangle between two apartment doormen and a gardener. After a slow start, the pace picks up quickly and Scholefield retains his place in the front rank of English crime writers.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Over howls of protest that their Major Investigation Pool is being assigned to something so minor, Superintendent George Macrae and his partner, Leo Silver, are pressed into investigating a series of burglaries in London's posh Selbourne Place. Despite the travails of his own long-running domestic soap opera--his second wife turns up on his doorstep and parks their kids with him and his tart, Frenchy--Macrae's ship is about to come in: He finds the body of a Middle East arms merchant ripening in his apartment. Where is Mr. Sadeq's Filipina maid, Alice Mendoza, who's wanted for questioning? She's been secretly taken in by precocious Dory Mavroulian, a seven-year-old savior armed with a pair of binoculars, a hidey-hole in her roof garden, and a formidable imagination that veers from private fantasizing (Alice becomes Alisha, the Princess full of Eastern Promise) to lying to the police (for whom she helpfully identifies dislikable gardener Ralph Eames as the man she saw fighting with Mr. Sadeq just before the Princess ran out). As the title suggests: too lightweight, even miscellaneous, to stand out in this fine series (Never Die in January, 1993, etc.). But Scholefield's salt-and-pepper detective pair continues to provide a solid alternative to Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe. --
Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
