Leave the grave green

Deborah Crombie

Book - 1995

Saved in:

1st Floor Show me where

MYSTERY/Crombie, Deborah
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
1st Floor MYSTERY/Crombie, Deborah Checked In
Subjects
Published
New York : Scribner's c1995.
Language
English
Main Author
Deborah Crombie (-)
Physical Description
253 p.
ISBN
9780060789558
9780684197708
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Scotland Yard investigators Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James venture out from London to find answers to the death of Connor Swann, son-in-law of a well-known couple: a famous conductor and a honored opera singer. Swann has been found floating in a Thames River lock, and when he's fished out, it's obvious he has been strangled. Because he was estranged from his wife, she's automatically a suspect. What Duncan and Gemma uncover in the course of their inquiry is that the couple--the conductor and the opera singer--also had a son who drowned many years ago while in his sister's company. Of course it's in Duncan and Gemma's professional best interests to find out if there's a connection between the two events. Detail and pacing are immaculate as the investigation is drawn closer and closer toward domestic secrets as the source of the solution to the crime. A superbly engrossing whodunit for all active mystery collections. ~--Brad Hooper

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Crombie's Scotland Yard Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and his sergeant Gemma Jones make a welcome return, after All Shall Be Well, to investigate a suspicious drowning in the countryside outside London. The seemingly placid domestic life of distinguished conductor Sir Gerald Asherton and his wife, Dame Caroline Stowe, a renowned soprano, is disturbed when their son-in-law's body slips through the local lock and is dragged up to reveal suspicious bruises around the neck. The Ashertons' daughter Julia had recently left Connor, who was ``on good terms with pints and ponies.'' While her parents continued to lunch weekly with the victim in their stately home, Julia, who 20 years earlier had witnessed her little brother's death by drowning, has had nothing to do with him. The youthful, slightly rumpled Kincaid, his pleasant manner masking a keen intelligence, and the equally insightful, appealing Jones make little pretense that police work is objective, detached business. Occasionally Crombie lets their personal feelings-Kincaid's for the widow, Jones's for opera, and both for each other-outweigh the story. Nonetheless, the passages of the first drowning are haunting, the mystery is intriguing, the characters are well developed and the solution satisfies. Stay tuned. Author tour. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

When police detectives Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James (who are series regulars) investigate a suspicious drowning near London, they encounter a strange situation: the victim's widow-a painter whose father is a famous conductor and whose mother is a renowned opera singer-is oddly stand-offish and strangely unaffected by her husband's death. Crombie (All Shall Be Well, LJ 1/94) creates strategic tension by both establishing a parallel between this drowning and the childhood drowning death of the painter's brother and by juxtaposing two protagonists who feel-but struggle against-a mutual attraction. Lucid prose, well-focused plot, and all the trappings of a cosy British mystery-from a talented American author. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Twenty years after their son, Matthew, drowned in an accident near their home, noted opera conductor Sir Gerald Asherton and his wife, Dame Caroline Stowe, who retired from the opera stage after Matty's death, have an eerily similar tragedy to face: The body of their daughter Julia's estranged husband, Connor Swann, of whom they've remained inexplicably fond, has tumbled from the Hambledon Lock. But Connor's death, as Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and Sergeant Gemma James (All Shall Be Well, p. 19, etc.) soon realize, was anything but accidental, and someone among the circle of mourners must be feigning grief- -unless his killer was his widow, who takes sharp issue with the descriptions of her mother (``everyone liked Con'') and the English National Opera staff (``a lovely man'') and calls him a ``bastard.'' Dividing the labor of interrogating the suspects--Gemma takes an afternoon at Brown's Hotel to enjoy an impossibly English tea with opera wardrobe manager Tommy Godwin, with Anglophilic Texan Crombie piling on the scones and clotted cream and coy remarks about prewar detective fiction--the two veterans of Scotland Yard's Homicide Squad patiently unearth the secret Connor died for and predictably disturb the dust on Matty's grave. Though Gemma sagely tells Tommy, ``This isn't a detective novel, for heaven's sake,'' it's as tidily plotted and neatly written as the genuine article.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Leave the Grave Green Chapter One From the train window Duncan Kincaid could see the piles of debris in the back gardens and on the occasional common. Lumber, dead branches and twigs, crushed cardboard boxes and the odd bit of broken furniture -- anything portable served as fair game for Guy Fawkes bonfires. He rubbed ineffectually at the grimy window-pane with his jacket cuff, hoping for a better view of one particularly splendid monument to British abandon, then sat back in his seat with a sigh. The fine drizzle in the air, combined with British Rail's standard of cleanliness, reduced visibility to a few hundred yards. The train slowed as it approached High Wycombe. Kincaid stood and stretched, then collected his overcoat and bag from the rack. He'd gone straight to St. Marleybone from the Yard, grabbing the emergency kit he kept in his office -- clean shirt, toiletries, razor, only the necessities needed for an unexpected summons. And most were more welcome than this, a political request from the AC to aid an old school chum in a delicate situation. Kincaid grimaced. Give him an unidentified body in a field any day. He swayed as the train lurched to a halt. Bending down to peer through the window, he scanned the station carpark for a glimpse of his escort. The unmarked panda car, its shape unmistakable even in the increasing rain, was pulled up next to the platform, its parking lights on, a gray plume of exhaust escaping from its tailpipe. It looked like the cavalry had been called out to welcome Scotland Yard's fair-haired boy. "Jack Makepeace. Sergeant, I should say. Thames Valley CID." Makepeace smiled, yellowed teeth showing under the sandy bristle of mustache. "Nice to meet you, sir." He engulfed Kincaid's hand for an instant in a beefy paw, then took Kincaid's case and swung it into the panda's boot. "Climb in, and we can talk as we go." The car's interior smelled of stale cigarettes and wet wool. Kincaid cracked his window, then shifted a bit in his seat so that he could see his companion. A fringe of hair the same color as the mustache, freckles extending from face into shiny scalp, a heavy nose with the disproportionate look that comes of having been smashed -- all in all not a prepossessing face, but the pale blue eyes were shrewd, and the voice unexpectedly soft for a man of his bulk. Makepeace drove competently on the rain-slick streets, snaking his way south and west until they crossed the M40 and left the last terraced houses behind. He glanced at Kincaid, ready to divert some of his attention from the road. "Tell me about it, then," Kincaid said. "What do you know?" "Not much, and I'd just as soon you start from scratch, if you don't mind." Makepeace looked at him, opened his mouth as if to ask a question, then closed it again. After a moment he said, "Okay. Daybreak this morning the Hambleden lockkeeper, one Perry Smith, opens the sluicegate to fill the lock for an early traveler, and a body rushes through it into the lock. Gave him a terrible shock, as you can imagine. He called Marlow -- they sent a panda car and the medics." He paused as he downshifted into an intersection, then concentrated on overtaking an ancient Morris Minor that was creeping its way up the gradient. "They fished him out, then when it became obvious that the poor chappie was not going to spew up the canal and open his eyes, they called us." The windscreen wiper squeaked against dry glass and Kincaid realized that the rain had stopped. Freshly plowed fields rose on either side of the narrow road. The bare, chalky soil was a pale brown, and against it, the black dots of foraging rooks looked like pepper on toast. Away to the west, a cap of beech trees crowned a hill. "How'd you identify him?" "Wallet in the poor sod's back pocket. Connor Swann, aged thirty-five, brown hair, blue eyes, height about six feet, weight around twelve stone. Lived in Henley, just a few miles upstream." "Sounds like your lads could have handled it easily enough," said Kincaid, not bothering to conceal his annoyance. He considered the prospect of spending his Friday evening tramping around the Chiltern Hundreds, damp as a Guy Fawkes bonfire, instead of meeting Gemma for an after-work pint at the pub down Wilfred Street. "Bloke has a few drinks, goes for a stroll on the sluicegate, falls in. Bingo." Makepeace was already shaking his head. "Ah, but that's not the whole story, Mr. Kincaid. Someone left a very nice set of prints on either side of his throat." He lifted both hands from the wheel for an instant in an eloquently graphic gesture. "It looks like he was strangled, Mr. Kincaid." Kincaid shrugged. "A reasonable assumption, I would think. But I don't quite see why that merits Scotland Yard's intervention." "It's not the how, Mr. Kincaid, but the who. It seems that the late Mr. Swann was the son-in-law of Sir Gerald Asherton, the conductor, and Dame Caroline Stowe, who I believe is a singer of some repute." Seeing Kincaid's blank expression, he continued, "Are you not an opera buff, Mr. Kincaid?" "Are you?" Kincaid asked before he could clamp down his involuntary surprise, knowing he shouldn't have judged the man's cultural taste by his physical characteristics. "I have some recordings, and I watch it on the telly, but I've never been to a performance." The wide sloping fields had given way to heavily wooded hills, and now, as the road climbed, the trees encroached upon it. "We're coming into the Chiltern Hills," said Makepeace. "Sir Gerald and Dame Caroline live just a bit farther on, near Fingest. The house is called 'Badger's End,' though you wouldn't think it to look at it." He negotiated a hairpin bend, and then they were running downhill again, beside a rocky stream ... Leave the Grave Green . Copyright © by Deborah Crombie. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Leave the Grave Green by Deborah Crombie All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.