Threats and Menaces: A MacRae and Silver Novel

From her London roof garden, the lonely young daughter of a popular romance writer watches the apartment building across the street, keeping an eye on the window where she sometimes sees a Filipina maid whom she calls the Princess of the Pavement People. One day she sees two men struggling in the apartment. Later she meets the ``Princess,'' injured and confused, in the park and takes her to hide in the roof garden shed. Detective Superintendent George Macrae and Detective Sergeant Leopold Silver, tracing a rash of antique thefts in the area, discover the battered body of the maid's employer, an Arab, in the apartment, and they embark on yet another of Scholefield's ( Never Die in January ) spare and remarkably vibrant procedurals. The burly, often-married Macrae adjusts as two of his estranged kids come to live with him and his current love, a kindhearted and long-suffering tart, while Silver's quest for the yuppie dream continually is derailed by his weird relatives and those of his love, Zoe. Finally concentrating on the murder, the duo finds a case full of loose ends: an abused woman living in near slavery, a child with a keen eye and a wild imagination and a homosexual triangle between two apartment doormen and a gardener. After a slow start, the pace picks up quickly and Scholefield retains his place in the front rank of English crime writers. (May)