DANGEROUS PRACTICE

When it comes to marriage, Lucy Sedgwick doesn’t have much luck. Her first husband, Julian Veal, was a bigamist, and her second, Clive Malcolm, is (perhaps worse) a psychotherapist. So when Clive gets word on the night of their wedding that outpatient Patrick Garston has tried to hang himself, Lucy, sighing and settling for a delayed honeymoon, returns from Stakerleys, the Sedgwicks’ country estate, to London. Leaving the omnicompetent Mrs. Bowyers to set up the family’s new household in Chelsea and placing her infant daughter Petra in the affectionate care of Mabel the housemaid, she accompanies Clive to his clinic, where, with the help of elder colleague Ignatius Barrow and junior partner Stanley Atkinson, he tries to heal damaged minds using the newly discovered techniques of psychoanalysis. But when Garston remains resistant to treatment, Lucy suspects that his suicide attempt may be more sinister than it seems, especially once she discovers that right-handed Garston was found with his neck in a noose tied by someone left-handed. With help from sharp-faced and sharper-tongued Welshman Jeremy Owens, a friend of Clive’s, Lucy trolls for clues in Garston’s past until a near-fatal attack on Clive forces her to unmask a cold-blooded killer before he destroys everything she holds dear.

It doesn’t take Dr. Freud to see where the action is in this final chapter in Curzon’s Lucy Sedgwick trilogy (The Colour of Blood, 2000, etc.), which offers a little mystery, a whole lot of local color, and a surprisingly big dose of Clive and Lucy between the sheets.