Murder at Swann's Lake (Chief Inspector Woodend Mysteries)
As in his debut novel, The Salton Killings (1998), Scotland Yard's Chief Inspector Charlie Woodend sets out on his second adventure in 1960, though it might as well be 1930 when somebody ends mid-level criminal Robbie Peterson's drive for respectability by pounding a six-inch nail into his skull. Was the killer his ex-patron, disarmingly genial Liverpool crime boss Sid Dowd, or the muscleman Sid sent to visit Robbie at The Hideaway, the club Robbie owned at Swann's Lake? Perhaps Robbie was killed by Clem or Burt Green, the not-too-bright brothers who ran his sub-rosa errands? Or was the murderer still closer to himhis wife Doris, who never pretended to love him; his mysteriously affectionate daughter Jenny; her husband Terry, Robbie's ex-bagman in Liverpool, who'd married on the boss's orders; Terry's brother Michael, a schoolteacher who has nothing but disdain for anybody who strays from the straight and narrow; or Robbie's rebellious younger daughter Annabel, whose lifestyle seems calculated solely to embarrass the father she despises? Methodically sorting through the red herrings that create as many subplots as a vintage Agatha Christiein this case, drug sales, cigarette smuggling, nasty photos, an elaborate impersonation, and a pair of break-insWoodend and his loyal sergeant, Bob Rutter, sorely distracted by his fiances serious injury at (what else?) a political demonstration, match the felony to the suspect until the cheese stands alone. Quietly reliable retro puzzling.  --Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.