One Under

Starred review from November 30, 2015
Contemporary British police procedurals don’t get any better than Harrod-Eagles’s 18th Bill Slider mystery (following 2014’s Star Fall), which opens with two apparently unrelated deaths. A middle-aged city planner jumps in front of a train at a London tube stop and a teenage girl from a city slum is found in a country lane, possibly the victim of a hit-and-run. Slider, now a detective chief inspector, is only peripherally involved, but things that don’t quite fit tend to niggle at him until he can make sense of them. In this case, those little threads eventually lead to something that is not only awful but affects those so far up the food chain that he is ordered—more than once—to desist. But with his staff of devoted and clever underlings, he cannot. In an age when police budgets are being cut, how much must one kowtow to those who control the purse strings? This is a meditation on modern times as well as a crackling good story.

Starred review from January 5, 2015
A celebrity murder preoccupies Det. Insp. Bill Slider in Harrod-Eagles’s excellent 17th mystery featuring the London policeman (after 2013’s Hard Going). Who could have fatally stabbed Rowland Egerton, the popular star of the TV show Antiques Galore!, in his beautiful early Victorian home? Suspicion falls on his longtime friend and business partner, John Lavender, but the more Slider and his team learn about Egerton, the slimier he becomes. Personal details balance the police proceedings: Slider’s wife, Joanne, is recovering from a miscarriage. The couple’s tentative steps toward easing their grief and putting their relationship back on an even keel ring true. Clear, direct prose offers the occasional unexpected phrase: “The traffic lights, all green, were round alien eyes watching him”; a good-looking man has an “enviable head of hair, sculpted by the same firm that designed the Sydney Opera House.” This well-done tale should earn the author new fans.

February 1, 2016

A middle-aged city planner jumps in front of a London tube train; a 15-year-old girl is the victim of a fatal hit-and- run accident. DCI Bill Slider, never one to take the easy way out, gradually links the two cases in the 18th addition to this excellent British police procedural series (Hard Going).

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2015
DI Bill Slider's latest case is a doozy. TV star Rowland Egerton, whose popular antiques show has garnered him legions of adoring fans, is found stabbed in the neck in his luxurious London home. At first, Egerton's longtime business partner is the top suspect, but when he's proved innocent, Slider and his team are left with few leads. Slider's boss is pushing for a result, so when the team discovers that Egerton's colleagues disliked him for his pompous, supercilious attitude, and he was also a notorious womanizer who left a string of broken female hearts and angry husbands in his wake, they figure there are plenty of people with a motive to kill him. But when they finally solve the case, the result is as shocking as it is sad. Harrod-Eagles is one of the doyennes of British police procedurals, and her latest keeps her firmly in that position. Not only does she offer solid plots, strong characters that readers can relate to, authentic cop shoptalk, and plenty of twists, but just at the darkest, grimmest moment, she also throws in a bit of laugh-aloud levity that's pure genius. Highly recommended.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

December 15, 2015
DI Bill Slider and his team are in a rare quiet period when their interest is piqued by two separate cases: the hit-and-run death of a teenager in a London suburb, and a man who kills himself by jumping in front of a Tube train. Slider is particularly keen to solve the hit-and-run death because he simply can't understand what a young girl from central London was doing so far from home and why she was dressed so provocatively. As Slider investigates, he finds a tenuous link to the Tube train death, and he simply can't let the case go, even though his boss is furious that Slider is wasting precious time and resources on a case that's outside his jurisdiction. As usual, Harrod-Eagles offers up an attention-grabbing, fast-paced, engrossing police procedural with plenty of twists and a hero who's a gifted copper and a likable human being. Slider isn't as curmudgeonly as Ian Rankin's John Rebus, but he will certainly appeal to the same readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2015
Digging into an architect's suicide reveals all manner of felonious perversion in London. There's no doubt that George Peleponnos topped himself. Video footage shows him throwing himself under the wheels of a train arriving at the Shepherd's Bush station, and an obliging witness confirms that there was no one near him when he jumped. But Bill Slider, recently promoted to DCI, can't leave the case alone even though his higher-ups keep telling him that there is no case. He can't forget the financial connections the North Kensington Regeneration Trust established between Peleponnos and a number of highflying donors or the very recent telephone calls Peleponnos exchanged with Kaylee Adams, a teenage shoplifter killed by a hit-and-run driver out on the fringe of London. And once Slider links Kaylee's death to that of her friend Tyler Vance, fished out of the Thames six months ago, he's convinced that something terrible has been going on at the raucous parties local MP Gideon Marler has been holding. When Marler, chair of the Police Select Committee, speaks to Assistant Commissioner Derek Millichip, another NKRT donor whose domain includes Shepherd's Bush, Slider is told in no uncertain terms to cease and desist. Naturally, he soldiers on, uncovering pretty much exactly what you'd expect, but he's outmaneuvered at every step by well-placed enemies a lot less impulsive than he is. No prizes for the dogged detective work by Slider and his colleagues (Star Fall, 2015, etc.), who mostly examine phone records and keep interviewing the same forbidden subjects. But if you're looking for moral outrage in the face of unabashed evil, Shepherd's Bush is your kind of place.

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March 1, 2015

In this 17th series installment (after Hard Going), DI Bill Slider is savoring the post-Christmas quiet in his London police station, until a call comes in, alerting the team to the murder of famed daytime TV personality Rowland Egerton. The immediate suspect is his business partner, but Slider soon discovers that Egerton had many more enemies than friends.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.