From Publishers Weekly
Prolific British crime writer Curzon convincingly makes the case for a larger U.S. readership with this well-crafted whodunit, the 10th entry in her series to feature Det. Supt. Mike Yeadings (after 2003's
The Body of a Woman). Yeadings and his diverse team of Thames Valley detectives probe the death of a young woman found stabbed in a car, clothed only in a fur coat. The circle of suspects includes her neighbors in a new apartment development and her estranged father. Curzon does an excellent job of portraying the byplay and pedestrian details of daily police work and throws in enough plot twists to satisfy classic mystery fans. The solution is unexpected but logical, and while Curzon is not quite Peter Lovesey, those who enjoy that author's Peter Diamond series should find Yeadings an acceptable substitute.
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Product Description
Superintendent Mike Yeadings' sergeant, Rosemary Zyczynski, (call her "Z") had a psychic itch about her landlady's celebration dinner. "Did you get a feeling," she asks her lover, Max, "that there's more going on under this roof than readily meets the eye?"
Rosemary couldn't have been righter. The dinner was in honor of the new house - a large, once private mansion that had been through numerous changes of face throughout the years. Now Z's landlady had bought it to replace her original dingy building, and Rosemary had moved with her from the old to the new. The partry was to welcome the tenants of the several new apartments that had been made in the new house.
Z's uneasiness about her fellow tenants was quickly forgotten; she had more pressing problems of her own. Yeadings was about to choose either Rosemary or Beaumont, his other sergeant, to promote to inspector, and the unavoidable subsurface rivalry between the two very different police detectives had raised a barrier that hindered them in their work. The work they did have came close to Rosemary herself and startled her into remembering her words to Max. The body of one of the tenants, a single woman who had moved in with her mother, was found brutally murdered, and the case naturally was Yeadings' responsibility and thus that of Rosemary and Beaumont.
Curzon uncannily keeps on bringing her readers believable characters, both the stalwart Yeadings and his Woman Friday, Z, as well as whole groups of once-a-book individuals who set a reader right smack in the middle of the little English town and the puzzling and intriguing crime that can be found there.
