ALPHA, BETA, GAMMA...DEAD
by Betty Rowlands
A stabbing at a quiet hotel is the first case for the newest member of the Bristol CID.
DC Sukey Reynolds (Party to Murder, 2006, etc.) has just been promoted to the team led by DS Greg Rathbone, an experienced investigator who has no time for her hunch about the stabbing of Dr. Whistler, an archaeologist newly returned from Greece. Whistler had arranged to meet Prof. Stephen Lamont to hand over a recently discovered letter that may have been written by St. Paul. Rathbone is sure Lamont’s the killer, especially when he’s identified by a nervous Albanian hotel worker as the man he saw leaving the hotel half an hour before he was to meet with Whistler. The room safe, open and empty, had contained valuable artifacts dug up in Greece—a possible motive for Lamont, who’s short on money because of his mentally disturbed sister’s problems. When the sister tells Sukey it was her fault Stephen stabbed Whistler, things look grim for Lamont, but Sukey, convinced he’s innocent, continues to nose around even after she’s taken off the case. The affair is complicated by the involvement of a crime syndicate and the murder of a young foreign girl found with Sukey’s phone number in her pocket. Sukey has to tiptoe through the thicket of police rules and regulations to prove her hunch correct.
A pleasant distaff addition to the ranks of the British procedural.