Clare Curzon has been writing for a long time - since the 1960s, and she shows the expertise you would expect in this workmanlike mystery, the latest in her Superintendent Mike Yeadings series set in the Thames Valley. The story is extremely well crafted with excellent use of flashback and multiple viewpoints. We begin with a rather mysterious Filipino, Ramon, seeing a body plummet from the top of a seven storey building and observe his unusual reactions before plunging into the events of the days leading up to this happening and then continuing onwards in real time.
Clare Curzon has written a number of previous adventures for Mike and his colleagues
but this one focuses firmly on the characters around a penthouse flat which
features a glass wall onto the street and is occupied by a virtually bedridden
94 year old lady in need of continual attention. The private lives of the police
team are kept very much in the background although in previous volumes of the
series that I have read they were much less peripheral. This is not a complaint
- I enjoyed the skilful introduction of a new cast of characters experiencing
a string of events which seem separate, but inevitably link together. The police
play a valuable role in making sense of some very modern problems.
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Jennifer S. Palmer
Clare Curzon began writing crime fiction in 1962 under the pseudonym Rhona Petrie.
As Clare Curzon she introduced the Police Superintendent Yeadings series in
1983 with I Give You Five Days and The Glass Wall is the 18th
volume about this Thames Valley police team. There is also a trilogy concerning
Lucy Sedgwick set initially in 1908 with Guilty Knowledge and a stand
alone title Flawed Light