The Distant Dead by Lesley Thomson
| The Distant Dead by Lesley Thomson | |
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| Category: Crime | |
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Reviewer: Sue Magee
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| Summary: Book eight in the series sees Stella Darnell in Tewkesbury. It's a cracker of a story and highly recommended. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 384 | Date: May 2021 |
| Publisher: Head of Zeus | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1788549752 | |
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It was December 1940 and twenty-four-year-old Maple Greenhill had gone out for the evening 'with her friend Ida' leaving her three-year-old son, William, at home with her parents. The boy thought that Maple was his sister - it was better for the family than the shame of illegitimacy, but Maple had high hopes of putting her life (and William's) on a better footing. She was going to meet her well-to-do fiancé, hoping to persuade him to come and meet her family the following week. Later, her body would be found in the bombed-out home where he had taken her.
Jack Harmon thinks that he and Stella Darnell are 'taking a break'. Stella obviously needed some space after a particularly difficult time, but this isn't how Stella sees the situation. So far as she's concerned she and Jack have broken up. Her mother is in Sydney and Stella has taken a flat in Tewkesbury with Lucie May, the journalist, who once had an affair with her father. Her cleaning business, Clean Slate, is floundering in London, in her absence, despite the efforts of her team to keep it running, and Stella is taking ad hoc cleaning jobs in Tewkesbury, mostly associated with the cathedral.
It tells you something about Stella's state of mind that she's taken to attending the Death Café in the cathedral tearooms. It's a group of people who gather to discuss death. The facilitator is Dr Felicity Branscombe, a retired forensic pathologist and she attempts to keep order amongst Andrea Hammond, a gardener, Joy Turton, the cathedral organist, Roddy Marsh, a podcaster, Gloria Wren, a local landlady, Clive Burgess the clockmaker - and Stella. It's largely a lost cause and Stella quickly comes to realise that there are some strange relationships amongst her fellow attendees. And then Stella discovers one of them dying, in the cathedral. It's only the first death - and in some strange way, it all links back to the death of Maple Greenhill, nearly eighty years ago.
We know who killed Maple: it was Dr Aleck Northcote, the renowned forensic pathologist. Detective Inspector George Cotton, called out of retirement because of the war, knows it too and actually gets to the point of arresting Northcotte only to be over-ridden by his superiors: such an important man could not be charged with what they saw as 'the murder of a prostitute' and taken away from the war effort. It was George Cotton who would be put out to grass.
It's two years since I read The Playground Murders, the sixth book in Lesley Thomson's The Detective's Daughter series and I thought that one was the strongest yet in the series. Well, Thomson has done it again: this is another cracker. The plotting is superb: I long ago realised that it was fruitless to try and second guess as to who the killer was. With Thomson you're in safe hands - relax and enjoy a great mystery, well told. It's a book to read once to find out who did it - and then to go back and read again to find out how the author did it.
We know many of the regular characters - the employees of Clean Slate who lead double lives as talented amateur detectives. Even if you've never met them before they come off the page brilliantly. And talking of whether or not you've met them before - you could read The Distant Dead as a stand-alone but you'd get a lot more out of it if you read it as part of the series.
I'd like to thank the publishers for allowing Bookbag to have a review copy.
Lesley Thomson's The Detective's Daughter Novels in Chronological Order
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