THE MARX SISTERS

Detective Sergeant Kathy Kolla, handling her very first murder investigation, isn’t even sure Meredith Winterbottom was murdered. There are clues that the old woman was smothered with a plastic bag, but a telltale plastic bag isn’t one of them, and the medical evidence is infuriatingly inconclusive. Meredith’s scarcely-younger sisters, Peg Blythe (who prides herself on being the last Stalinist in England) and Eleanor Harper (who calls herself a scientific socialist), help mainly by providing a possible motive: the three of them, co-tenants in London’s homely Jerusalem Lane, are the last holdouts against the cash blandishments of developer Derek Slade. Was Meredith killed by Slade or one of his impatient minions? Does one of her decamped former neighbors know anything about her death? Was she killed because of the old books and papers she’d been fussing over? Or does her death have any connection to Karl Marx, the great-grandfather she shares with her two sisters? Partnered by Chief Inspector David Brock (and the riddle of why such a big cheese is working such a small case has a satisfying answer of its own), Kathy puzzles over it in vain—until matters come to a head when one of the surviving sisters is killed in a similar, but more emphatic, way. A clever, flavorsome debut with a particularly deft knack of pulling the rug out from under you in between chapters, just when you think you’re safe.