Gone to Ground
(Grayson & Walker)
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Will's first thought when he saw the man's face: it was like a glove that had been pulled inside out.
When police detective Will Grayson and his partner, Helen Walker, are called upon to investigate the violent death of Stephen Bryan, a gay Cambridge academic, their first thoughts are off an ill-judged sexual encounter, of rough trade gone wrong.
But as their investigation widens, their attention focusses on the biography Bryan was writing about the life and death of fifties film star, Stella Leonard, whose death from drowning, when the car she was driving skidded mysteriously off a lonely Fenland road, uncannily echoed the climax of her most notorious film, Shattered Glass.
With Bryan's journalist sister egging them on, and bringing herself into mortal danger as she conducts her own investigation, Will and Helen gradually peel away the secrets of a family blighted by a lust for wealth and power and its own perverted sexuality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Acclaimed British author Harvey takes a break from his popular Charlie Resnick series (Lonely Hearts, etc.) with this well-written but unexciting police procedural. Stephen Bryan, a gay academic specializing in film studies, has been bludgeoned to death in his shower. Cambridge Det. Insp. Will Grayson and Det. Sgt. Helen Walker soon focus on Bryan's spurned lover, Mark McKusick, but the theft of one of Bryan's manuscripts, which deals with a 1950s film star whose great-niece is now one of the bad girls of British cinema, leads the detectives to wonder whether the professor's digging into the past led to his murder. While the solution is anticlimactic and the excerpts from a fictional screenplay add little to the plot or atmosphere, Grayson and Walker emerge as fully developed characters whose choice of career has taken its toll on their health and family lives.
