A Commonplace Killing
A Novel
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Set in the bleakness and confusion of post-WWII London, this gripping psychological thriller unravels the double life of a seemingly proper middle-class woman found strangled to death.
On a damp July morning in 1946, two schoolboys find a woman’s body in a bomb site in north London. The woman is identified as Lillian Frobisher, a wife and mother who lived in a war-damaged terrace a few streets away.
The police assume that Lil must have been the victim of a vicious sexual assault; but the autopsy finds no evidence of rape, and Divisional Detective Inspector Jim Cooper turns his attention to her private life.
How did Lil come to be in the bomb site – a well-known lovers’ haunt? If she had consensual sex, why was she strangled? Why was her husband seemingly unaware that she had failed to come home on the night she was killed?
In this gripping murder story, Siân Busby gradually peels away the veneer of stoicism and respectability to reveal the dark truths at the heart of postwar austerity Britain.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1946 London, this superb psychological thriller from Busby (McNaughten) features Det. Insp. Jim Cooper, who "had the feeling that he had once done something worthwhile, something good, but had forgotten whatever it was." His bleak outlook on life, and himself, is a perfect fit for the time and place as expectations that peace would bring with it a new attitude to the people of Holloway, the London enclave he's assigned to, are not met. When some kids discover a woman's corpse, the mess becomes his to sort out. The victim was strangled, but whether she was raped beforehand is unclear from the evidence. Cooper's devotion to his duty doesn't get the respect of his superiors, who would prefer that his energies be devoted to the black market rather than "a commonplace killing." Busby, who died in 2012, does a brilliant job of depicting how the war left "common decencies bereft and clinging on for dear life."
