In Kelly's fifth polished cozy to feature Canadian professor Gillian Adams (after Old Wounds, winner of the 1999 Arthur Ellis Best Novel Award), Gillian has moved from Vancouver to London to share a flat with her longtime lover, Edward Gisborne, a Scotland Yard Inspector. When our heroine looks up an old friend, Charlotte Douglas, who's been unwell since her husband left her years before, Gillian learns that Charlotte's actress daughter, Olivia Bening, has just made her first major film. Unfortunately, a very disturbed young man, Kevin Brody, has been stalking Olivia. The astute reader will recognize the lad for a time bomb. Kevin takes an awfully long time to go off, but provides just about the only suspense, apart from Charlotte's mysterious death in her garden. Otherwise, the plot proceeds by a series of chats. Charlotte and Olivia share a dark secret that is as predictable as most everything else in the novel. On the plus side, the author excels in giving us a feel for contemporary London during a heat wave ("As stragglers from after-hours clubs fell from taxis into unmade beds, the mercury climbed, and the soft, dusky faces of terraces and warehouses hardened in the daylight"), and her characters do have a solidity about them. One can believe Olivia is an actress and Kevin a mental case. And Kevin's explosive finale is genuinely exciting. Kelly has a loyal following, and while this latest is not up to her usual high standard, her fans will look forward to it just the same. (Apr. 12)
