Past Tense: A Sloan and Crosby Mystery
Catherine Aird, Minotaur, $25.99 (272p) ISBN 978-0-312-67291-1
In British veteran Aird's brilliantly sardonic 23rd fair-play whodunit featuring Calleshire County Det. Insp. C.D. Sloan and Sloan's sidekick, Detective Constable Crosby (after 2008's Losing Ground), Sloan starts with a relatively benign inquiry. The matron of the Berebury Nursing Home suspects that the room of a recently deceased resident, Josephine Short, was burglarized, but she can't be sure that anything was actually taken. Short left a sizable estate, but few survivors. The wife of her great-nephew, who didn't actually know her, made the funeral arrangements, and her only other blood relation is a grandson of whose existence other family members were unaware. The mystery of the possible theft may be linked to a 24-year-old woman, whose corpse, bearing bruises around the throat, a fisherman found floating Ophelia-like in the River Alm. Fans of Peter Lovesey's Victorian-era Sergeant Cribb novels should find Sloan a fitting modern-day counterpart. (Mar.)
Details
Reviewed on: 12/20/2010
Genre: Fiction
Compact Disc - 978-0-7927-7508-9
Compact Disc - 978-1-9826-5902-8
Hardcover - 286 pages - 978-0-7490-0764-5
Hardcover - 363 pages - 978-1-4104-3763-1
Hardcover - 336 pages - 978-0-7505-3368-3
Open Ebook - 288 pages - 978-1-4299-5356-6
Paperback - 350 pages - 978-0-7490-0956-4