When Beattie Weyman comes into some money she buys and converts a large house into seven superior flats. Her aim is to provide herself with her own soap-opera, orchestrated by herself from a cast of characters under her own roof. Once the tenants are installed she invites them all to dinner party, to get to know each other.
On the surface it all looks promising, Mrs Vanessa Winter and her daughter Sheila, who owns the garden centre, Greenvale, promises to supply fresh cut flowers for the house at a cut price. Miss Marjorie Barnes, a plump deputy Headmistress of the local girls secondary school seems to have jelled rather well with, tall thin, silver-haired Major Phillips. Neil Raynes and Martin Chisholm seem something of a mystery, as does Paul Wormley, who is particularly security conscious. Also a tenant at Ashbourne House is DS Rosemary Zyczynski, known as Z, but Z decides to keep the Detective Sergeant information to herself. That is until called out to the scene of a murder, which turns out to be the body of her neighbour wrapped only in a fur coat.
Overseeing both the investigation, and his two competing Detective Sergeants, Z and DS Beaumont both keen to get the acting-inspectorship, is Detective Superintendent Mike Yeadings. As the investigation progresses the case abounds with suspects, for Sheila Winter’s Manager at the garden centre is Barry Childe on parole from a sentence for GBH, who states he is now a teetotal and has found God. Paul Wormley who has a secret, and what of Dr Gabriel Fenner, Sheila’s father, and builder Frank Perrin, who always seems to be around.
This book invoked a wonderful nostalgia for the whodunits I have always enjoyed.
All the characters under one roof, all with secret lives that the investigator
unearths little by little, so every new secret revealed provides a motive, and
you think that’s the killer. This is the first I have read in the series and
I look forward to reading the earlier ones.
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Lizzie Hayes
Clare Curzon has published more than 40 novels. A Meeting of Minds is
the tenth book in the series featuring Superintendent Mike Yeadings and his
team.