Author: annecleeland

This homicide case featured aristocrats as far as the eye could see, between the Russians and the Spaniards—and Acton, of course, who was supposedly investigating the others but seemed a little too deferential, for Doyle’s taste. Why wasn’t her husband moving in on the killer? And why did she have the sense that she was standing on the outside, peering into a world where there were no laws and no … no explanations—only birthrights, forged in ancient blood.more

Doyle was back at Scotland Yard after taking maternity leave, and the powers-that-be had decided they’d ease her way by assigning her to assist DS Isabella Munoz, which was a fate only slightly worse than death.Annoying, it was, that she had to answer to Munoz; not to mention that Munoz wasn’t given many high-quality homicide assignments in the first place.As a case in point, the first assignment … assignment out of the box was a possible suicide at the housing projects, something that happened with such regularity that it was a wonder the responding officer had even thought it worthy…

This holiday trip to Dublin had been very hard on Doyle’s husband—although he was making a monumental effort to disguise this fact—and unless she very much missed her guess, it was all somehow connected to the grisly murder on the station-house steps. That, and an African cab-driver who wore a jaunty tam o’shanter.

Police rookie Kathleen Doyle is drawn into a boundary-pushing homicide investigation by her obsessive Scotland Yard colleague, chief inspector Michael Sinclair. “It’s been a long time since I encountered two characters this charming and engaging” (David Morrell).