Multiple murder scarcely disturbs the deeper slumber of veteran Turnbull’s Yorkshire this time out.
Most everything is ever as it was in York. DCI George Hennessey (All Roads Leadeth, 2003, etc.) still takes his dog Oscar to the pub for last call, speaks nightly in his garden to late wife Jennifer, and carries on a discreet affair with forensic pathologist Louise D’Acre. DS Sommerled Yellich and his wife Sara worry about what the future holds for their developmentally disabled son Jeremy. Both tread the walls of the ancient city in their daily trip to the Micklegate Bar Police Station. The discovery of four fresh corpses—two male and two female, their necks neatly snapped—and the chest full of coins hidden in crumbling Edgefield House causes little more than a ripple. The first order of business is to ID the deceased. Turns out they’re the Inngeys, the eccentric family who owned Edgefield House and lived poor as church mice despite a hereditary peerage in the Manor House at Long Hundred. Next: Try and locate Harold Inngey, the ne’er-do-well surviving son. Speak with Samantha Hewlett, Harold’s kick-boxer ex-girlfriend. Poke around the village. Interview Nancy Braithwaite, the housekeeper. (Oops, she’s dead, too.) Tantalizing questions—how can the postmortem find the Inngeys’ daughter not a virgin if she never left the house?—remain unanswered until the murderer eventually unmasks himself.
Not even an 11th-hour kidnapping can redeem Turnbull’s latest from deadly dullness.
