LOVE AND MURDER

by Peter Whalley ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1989

Another of Whalley's coldly comic, low-key British thrillers (Robbers, Old Murders), this one with a London gang war involving drugs and pornography on one side and an impecunious naif on the other. The naif is the appealingly ordinary Martyn Culley, whose rescue of a child from drowning in a pond in the Lake District brings him to the attention of Julie Eden--wealthy and attractive, though also disconcertingly direct and secretive, ten years older than Martyn, and the survivor of a shady past. Martyn first shares Julie's dinner, then her bungalow, then (weeks later) her bed, but is bothered by her remoteness and is about to leave when he comes home to find her standing over a corpse she needs to get rid of. After burying the body, Martyn resolves to ferret out Julie's secrets--which less dense readers will have identified already, since Martyn's and Julie's story is interspersed with a deadpan account of how random acts of individual violence against a stripper and a prostitute spark organized reprisals against the rival gangs wrongly assumed to be responsible. When Martyn's old flame Wendy Harriman links Julie to small-time hoodlum Adrian Donnachie, Martyn--taking him for a blackmailer--kills him, setting the stage for a neatly ironic ending. Though the revelation of Donnachie's true significance is easily predictable, nasty jokes continue to pop like so many stray firecrackers until Whalley's very last sentence. Not as ingeniously plotted as Whalley's best work, but still a sly, deft performance is his own distinctive manner.

Pub Date: July 1, 1989

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1989

Categories: FICTION