Dead Silent

In Roberts’s uneven second mystery featuring Liverpool Det. Chief Insp. Eve Clay (after Blood Mist), Clay and her team investigate the murder of elderly art historian Leonard Lawson, whose naked body was found in his bedroom, suspended by ropes from a pole under a strobe light. Such a setup would have required more than one killer. Lawson’s grown daughter, Louise, who was in her father’s house at the time, suffers an epileptic seizure and sustains a head injury shortly after the murder. When she’s questioned in the hospital, Louise is incapable of communicating what she observed. Initial clues are The Tower of Babel, a painting removed from the scene by the killers; a book open on Lawson’s desk about Hieronymous Bosch’s The Last Judgment; and an unpublished manuscript in a locked drawer. Clay’s pursuit of the killers, who call themselves the First Born and the Angel of Destruction, maintains interest and the medieval art theme is engaging, but the book would have benefited from deeper character development of the detectives. Agent: Peter Buckman, Ampersand Agency (U.K.). (Nov.)