cover image Deathspell: A Novel of Suspense

Deathspell: A Novel of Suspense

Veronica Stallwood. Scribner Book Company, $20 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-684-19517-9

With unerring characterization, droll copper dialogue and a gritty London setting, Harrod-Eagles mines fresh pleasures from standard procedural resources. London police officer Bill Slider and his urbane subordinate Atherton identify the corpse found charred in a motel fire as that of Richard Neal, and learn that he was a man involved with many women: a wife, a lover with a daughter, a colleague whom he seduced, another lover with a brutal husband, and a mysterious redhead. Slider, who senses himself drifting away from his wife and family in the direction of a mistress, finds painful personal parallels in the victim's life. As Slider and Atherton follow up leads, the obvious suspects fall to the wayside while several earlier deaths connect to suggest a strange pattern and, finally, a stranger motive. Neal, a fire alarm salesman, was once a fireman who was involved in a colleague's death under suspicious circumstances. Solving the considerable mysteries of this case, Slider finds, helps him only somewhat with his own dilemmas. Harrod-Eagles slyly sifts various strata of society in this admirable second novel, after An Orchestrated Death . Mystery Guild alternate. (Feb.)