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BOUGHT WITH BLOOD by Ann Quinton

BOUGHT WITH BLOOD

by Ann Quinton

Pub Date: March 1st, 2001
ISBN: 0-7278-5703-7
Publisher: Severn House

Murder most foul barely registers against the complications Quinton (Some Foul Play, 1997) has already heaped onto her plate. There’s Dorset DI Nick Holroyd’s discovery that his ten-year-old divorce never became final, and that the son his estranged wife bore in 1992 may have been his—quite a setback for physiotherapist Rachel Morland, his fiancée. There’s the sudden return of Ben Latimer, the infant Rachel’s schoolteacher friend Reid Frobisher gave up for adoption, now a strapping 19-year-old who’s decided to look up Mum. There’s the disappearance of longtime pedophile Mervyn Dooley, flushed out of his Casterford neighborhood by the vigilantes who forced him into hiding—where, as Nick’s dyspeptic super reminds him, he could be doing just about anything. There’s local vicar Peter Stevenson’s announcement that some century-old letters a parishioner recently unearthed may point to a never-published novel by favorite Dorset son Thomas Hardy. And there’s the student production of West Side Story that’s bringing together some of Reid’s students and her significant other, bookseller Tony Pomfret, in not entirely happy combinations. One story—the killing of Kevin Compton, the fellow alumnus from a group home Ben had just caught up with—upstages all the others, but you’d need a crystal ball to tell which of them were going to end up entangled with it.

Nick and Rachel don’t exactly shine as detectives, but Kevin’s murder eventually does get sorted out with due care—which is more than you can say for that clutter of subplots, most of which are wound up with insolently convenient dispatch.