TO DWELL IN DARKNESS

Sent down from Scotland Yard to Camden CID, Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid (No Mark upon Her, 2012, etc.) must deal with a bombing that disrupts a musical event in London’s storied St. Pancras station.

Well, not exactly a bombing. Anti-development activist Matthew Quinn and his mates from Save London’s History intend only to create a scene by tossing a smoke bomb into the St. Pancras International festivities headlined by DS Melody Talbot’s guitarist boyfriend, Andy Monahan, and singer Poppy Jones. Somewhere along the line, the smoke bomb morphs into a white phosphorous grenade—“an incendiary device, not an explosive”—and that’s what goes off in the station, spewing flames that seriously injure Tam Moran, Andy’s manager, and kill a man too badly burned to be readily identified. The surviving members of Save London’s History think the dead man must be Ryan Marsh, the mysterious fellow traveler who’d agreed to throw the smoke bomb. But further evidence dug up by Kincaid’s new team, whose members inevitably have their own internal differences, suggests that Marsh is still alive and that the victim must be someone else. As Kincaid presses forward, his wife, DI Gemma James, labors to build a case against electronics shop clerk Dillon Underwood for kidnapping, raping and murdering 12-year-old Mercy Johnson. This second case, however, is less absorbing than the dilemma the Kincaid-James children are having over what to do with the cat and four newborn kittens they’ve found starving and freezing in a locked shed.

The midgrade mystery is enriched by a wealth of detail about St. Pancras’ history and architecture that would do Margaret Truman proud.