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The death of a Yorkshire housewife turns into an international chase for George Hennessey (Informed Consent, 2009, etc.) and his team.
DCI Hennessey is surprised to find that the corpse found on the canal towpath, a woman who’d been held captive in a storage bin and starved for two days prior to her murder, was Edith Hemmings, the stay-at-home wife of Stanley Hemmings, an undermanager in a biscuit factory who lived in the modest but respectable neighborhood of Dringhouses. DS Somerled Yellich and DC Reg Webster are somewhat less surprised to find that Edith, known then as Julia Avrillé, had worked before her marriage at Lakeside, Alexander Beattie’s isolated country house, where she stole items of considerable value. Even less surprising, given the manner of her death, is the discovery that she was being stalked by a tall Canadian in a fur hat and tartan coat. Tracking down Julia’s passport, DC Carmen Pharoah discovers that she hailed from Barrie, Ontario. So Yellich and DC Thomson Ventnor are dispatched overseas, where Barrie Homicide Unit’s Aiden McLeer teams them with Francophone Marianne Auphan, even though everyone they interview turns out to speak English. Together they unearth a Julia whose checkered past makes more sense of her sordid end some 3,000 miles from her birthplace.
As usual, it takes a village to solve a crime. Hennessey’s squad works like a well-oiled machine, with a little help from its Canadian friends.
