THE BODY OF A WOMAN

A ninth case for Thames Valley Detective Superintendent Mike Yeadings.

Yeadings (Don’t Leave Me, 2002, etc.) recognizes the exquisitely dressed corpse found in Shotters Wood, once her feathered mask has been removed, as local shopkeeper Leila Knightley. But notifying Leila’s family proves difficult. Her philandering husband Aidan, a science professor, is off canoodling somewhere; her stepdaughter Chloe, secretly writhing with frightful snippets of memory, is visiting her granny in France; and her brother Charles and his live-in, sensible Janey, are away in Scotland. Prodded by Yeadings and his staff—Mott, Beaumont, and Z—the Knightleys eventually return home. Aidan, refusing to account for his absence, recognizes the death-dress as belonging to Chloe, but Chloe doesn’t recognize it at all, except to connect it somehow to bruises on her inner thighs and a whopping hangover. Whose dress was it? Sir Arthur Waites, spotting it in a newspaper article, thinks he bought it for his invalid wife years ago—news that draws Yeadings to his stately home in Henley, where a bookmaker’s thugs act as bouncers at gambling evenings and a drug-damaged son croons lullabies to his incapacitated mum, then suffocates her. Yeadings will have to consider the grille on a Mercedes, a fistful of gambling chits, and more of Chloe’s resurfacing memories before he surmises why Leila had to die and at whose hand.

Intriguing right up to—but not including—the wretchedly histrionic denouement.