Bleeding heart yard

Ed: This review has many sentences with similar syntax: Main clause, adjunct clause. The flow seems a little weird as a result. I edited a couple of spots, but if you or the reviewer could edit a couple more (I'm leery to do it myself, since I'm not so familiar with the plot), that might help with flow.]Harbinder Kaur has been promoted to DI of a murder-investigation team based in West Kensington, London, with her own office and her name on the door. When a member of her team, Cassie Fitzgerald, attends a school reunion, a fellow student, a controversial MP, dies of what appears to be a drug overdose. However, it's determined he was murdered, presumably for political reasons. Cassie finds herself reunited with her old clique, an absorbing assortment of friends. They all share a terrible secret from their school years--something that resulted in the death of one of their classmates--and once Harbinder unearths the story, she is sure there is a connection between that incident and the MP's murder. Griffiths has created a unique character in Harbinder, a 38-year-old gay Sikh woman. There is much to like and admire about her, including her quirks. (Instead of listening to the news, she plays Panda Pop.) This is the third book in the series (after The Postscript Murders, 2020), and, in addition to richly developed characters and a meaty plot, it features a spectacular ending: one of the best rescue scenes ever! Why, one wonders, hasn't even one of Griffiths' three series made it to the big or small screen yet?

A reunion of the class of 1998 at London's posh Manor Park school, "where trendy lefties send their kids," provides the backdrop for this stunning standalone from Edgar winner Griffiths (The Postscript Murder). One attendee, Det. Sgt. Cassie Fitzherbert, believes she pushed a classmate to his death on the rails of an abandoned underground tube station 21 years earlier, but could her memory be faulty? At Manor Park, Cassie was close friends with members of the Group, who used to meet in the attic of the home of Garfield Rice, now a Conservative MP. Every Group member has since had a successful career, except for EFL teacher Anna Vance, who's "definitely hiding something." Past crushes, jealousies, and buried passions surface, culminating in Rice's "unexplained" death in the loo, traces of cocaine on his lips. The stabbing murder of another MP at a dining club in Bleeding Heart Yard, a courtyard in Holborn, raises the stakes. Jaw-dropping red herrings, headbanging twists and turns, and Rashomon-like alternating narratives add to the briskly paced plot, which builds to a reconstruction of the original crime and a bombshell revelation. Donna Tartt fans won't be able to put this one down. Agent: Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Nov.)