HARDCASTLE'S OBSESSION

Divisional Detective Inspector Hardcastle (Hardcastle’s Mandarin, 2009, etc.) is back to his favorite sports: chasing murderers, rousting prostitutes and harassing his long-suffering sergeant, Marriott.

It looked as if all the occupants of 143 Washbourne Street were the unfortunate victims of one of Fritz’s zeppelins, sent to terrorize Londoners already weary of the Great War. But one of the bodies in the basement of the bombed-out Victorian shows signs of strangulation. Dr. Spilsbury confirms that the young woman, two months pregnant, was murdered before the blast, and Hardcastle just knows that she must be on the game. So he puts out the cry at Victoria Station, and soon enough, the young toms who work there identify the girl as Annie Kelly, late of Greenwich, who told her parents she was working in London as a housemaid. Now it’s up to Hardcastle and Marriott to check out Annie’s circle of acquaintances. Her boyfriend, Seamus Riley, seems to have left for the front with the Royal Irish Fusiliers. But her favorite trick, Sir Royston Naylor, is right in town. With his wife, Lady Henrietta, tucked safely away at his country estate, Naylor is carrying on with Sarah Cotton, another lady of the night. Sarah, a deep one, leaves her post at Victoria every night for an elegant townhouse in Cadogan Place. But from Blackfriars to Belgravia, if there’s crime afoot, Hardcastle will give chase, telling Marriott for the umpteenth time that you need to tell the taxi to take you to Scotland Yard; if you tell them Cannon Row, you’re likely to end up in town.

The war may have turned lives upside down in Hardcastle’s London, but nothing ever changes in the personal battle against miscreants of all shapes and sizes.