Chelsea Mansions
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £4.49
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- £4.49
Publisher Description
When Nancy Haynes, an elderly American tourist, is brutally murdered in a seemingly senseless attack after visiting the Chelsea Flower Show, DI Kathy Kolla suspects there is more to the case than first appears. When another occupant of the palatial Chelsea Mansions is murdered hot on the heels of the first - but this time a Russian oligarch - everybody wants to get involved.
Is it a Litvinenko-style KGB assassination? The spooks muscling in certainly think so. Are the murders linked? Or is Nancy's death just the result of mistaken identity? Kathy is determined to dig deeper, but comes up against walls of silence. If she persists, does she risk her career - and possibly more? DCI Brock, meanwhile, faces the fight of his life as his past comes back to haunt him.
A crime long buried, a deadly African virus, and some of the most resourceful criminals Brock and Kolla have ever faced, conspire to make this Maitland's best mystery yet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Near the outset of Maitland's overwrought 11th mystery featuring Det. Chief Insp. David Brock and Det. Insp. Kathy Kolla (after 2009's The Dark Mirror), an unknown but exceptionally strong assailant throws 70-year-old American widow Nancy Haynes, who spent the day at London's annual Chelsea Flower Show, to her death in front of a bus. What at first appears to be a random act of violence by a disturbed man turns out to be a carefully premeditated killing in which the accomplices are afraid to talk. Soon after, someone stabs to death a wealthy Russian oligarch in a garden near the Chelsea hotel where Haynes was staying. Brock and Kolla pursue both cases, which predictably intersect. Maitland throws in academics with arcane knowledge, glamorous model wives, armchair detectives, cold war ghosts, corrupt politicians, financial wizards, illegal immigrants, and much more, but the result is more wearying than stimulating.
