Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The triumphant creator of Charlie Resnick and Frank Elder introduces a new crime-stopping duo. DI Will Grayson and his partner DS Helen Walker, mainstays of Cambridge's Major Investigation Team, are repulsed by the brutal bashing of Stephen Bryan. The two first lean toward Bryan's rejected suitor, Mark McKusick, as the bludgeoner. Then other facts come to light, including a rash of homophobic hate-bashings within the past year; an anonymous threat warning Bryan off his latest project, a biography of '50s film star Stella Leonard; and the strong-arm tactics of real-estate developer Howard Prince, married to Stella's emotionally fragile sister. Once Stephen's sister Lesley, a BBC newscaster unhappy with the lack of police progress on her brother's case, strikes up a friendship with tabloid darling Natalie Prince, an uncontrollable relative of Stella's, Harvey cuts between Lesley's snooping and Grayson and Walker's more temperate investigation. Along the way, Walker is hospitalized after trying to break up a gang of racists; Will focuses on Howard Prince's dubious business practices; and Lesley and Natalie head for the Orkneys, where family secrets come out. Forensics will solve the Bryan murder, but it'll take more than one guilty conscience to clarify the mess Stella's made of her family's life. If anyone deserves to nudge Ian Rankin from his post as Britain's bestselling crime writer, it's Harvey (Darkness & Light, 2006, etc.). Reginald Hill explains it best: If he gets any better, the rest of us may have to kill him. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Along with his Frank Elder series, the successor to the now-classic Charlie Resnick novels, Harvey writes the occasional stand-alone. This one, set, like both of his series, in Nottingham, moves in a new direction for the multitalented author, whose usual milieu is the mean streets of the inner city, where poverty and racism breed crime. Here, on the other hand, he takes us behind the closed doors of the powerful, where closeted secrets rattle their chains until violence erupts. Two stories come together as police detectives Will Grayson and Helen Walker investigate the bludgeoning death of a gay film historian. Was it a crime of passion, or did the scholar's current project, a biography of 1950s actress Stella Leonard, whose death mirrored the demise of the character she played in a celebrated film noir, somehow move the killer to action? The investigation proceeds, in typically detailed fashion, with the detectives fighting their way out of seeming dead ends while dealing with multiple personal issues; but this time the story has a new level, as Harvey juxtaposes flashbacks to the actress' life and snippets from the script of her classic film. By doing so, that sense of inevitability, which is at the heart of film noir, re-creates itself offscreen, producing a frisson that drives the action, with past and present feeding off one another much in the manner of Ross Macdonald. More successfully, perhaps, than any other writer of a successful mystery series, Harvey continues to reinvent himself in novel after novel.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2008 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Investigating the brutal murder of gay academic Stephen Bryan, Det. Will Grayson and partner Helen Walker figure the real motive rests with the book he was writing about a faded Fifties star. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.