War Damage
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
London in the aftermath of WW2 is a beaten down, hungry place, so it's no wonder that Regine Milner's Sunday house parties in her Hampstead home are so popular. Everyone comes to Reggie's on a Sunday: ballet dancers and cabinet ministers, left-over Mosleyites alongside flamboyant homosexuals like Freddie Buckingham. And when Freddie turns up dead on the Heath one Sunday night there is no shortage of suspects.
War Damage is both a high-class thriller and a wonderful evocation of Britain staggering back to its feet after the privations of the War. And in Regine Milner it possesses a truly memorable heroine. She's full of secrets - just what did happen in Shanghai before the war? - and surprises - Reggie's living proof that sexual experimentation was alive and well long before the sixties.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like Wilson's The Twilight Hour (2007), also set in post-WWII London, this whodunit suffers from an ordinary plot and less-than-convincing characterizations. Shortly after Freddie Buckingham attends a house party thrown by writer and socialite Regine Milner, he's murdered on Hampstead Heath. The police investigation naturally leads them to Regine, her husband, Neville, and their guests. Neville uses his status as Buckingham's executor as justification for entering the dead man's rooms in advance of the authorities, where the couple discovers that some indelicate photographs are missing. Regine's withholding of information from the authorities, which parallels the actions of Dinah Wentworth, the socialite heroine of The Twilight Hour, places her in predictable difficulties. A police detective sergeant, whose over-the-top infatuation with Regine compromises him personally, adds little. The absence of a compelling puzzle isn't compensated for by any particular insights into postwar London society.
