DEATH TO GO

His violinist-lover Joanna keeps pressing Shepherd's Bush Inspector Bill Slider (Death Watch, 1993, etc.) to leave his wife for her, but something keeps turning up. This time it's a severed finger in a takeout order of Dave's Fish and Chips—soon followed by the rest of the (unidentifiable) corpse. Slider's spit-and-polish new boss, ``Mad Ivan'' Barrington, insists that Dave's manager, Ronnie Slaughter, be taken in—he'd just struck up a romantic liaison with his missing weekend helper Peter Leman—but then Slaughter, desperate to stay in lockup, gets his throat slit hours after his release. Meanwhile, Slider's attention is drawn back to the coincidence of one room in Slaughter's building being occupied by a succession of Asian tenants—and to the troubled memory of a ten-year-old drug bust that went sour under the eye of ex-CID businessman Colin Cate, working together with Mad Ivan. Sedate, intricate, and satisfyingly textured, though the last plot twist is one too many.