THE DECENT INN OF DEATH

An apparent death by misadventure evolves into a country-house scenario with three veteran detectives in play.

Since Chief Inspector Angus Sinclair’s retirement from the Metropolitan Police, he doesn’t have much to do except mind his blood pressure. An invitation from his former supervisor, also in retirement and living in nearby Hampshire, offers a change of scenery and the chance to meet Ann Waites, a neurologist writing a book about criminal psychopaths and eager to pick Sinclair’s brain. She’s not the only one who can benefit from his experience; the local vicar has lost his organist, Greta Hartmann, who fell while crossing a stream and hit her head. But her landlady insists that Greta was always careful when she crossed the stream, and Sinclair performs his own experiment that strongly points to murder. Greta was the widow of a brave German pastor who stood up to the Nazis, and Sinclair wants to find out if someone from her past is her killer. Through Ann, he meets Julia Lesage, a champion downhill skier who was injured in an accident and confined to a wheelchair. When Sinclair’s investigations strand him in a snowstorm, Julia sends her chauffeur to bring him back to her luxurious home. In the meantime, his erstwhile colleague John Madden (The Death of Kings, 2017, etc.) and his wife, who is Sinclair’s doctor, return home from holiday with a mystery of their own: where is Sinclair? Madden calls on his ex-colleagues for help and meets Kriminalinspektor Hans-Joachim Probst, who briefs Madden about a con man with a link to Greta’s death and a history of preying on rich, vulnerable women like Julia, who’s snowbound with Sinclair and a potential killer, but no power and no telephone, in her own mansion. Madden and Probst have to fight both the clock and the winter weather in Madden’s sixth deliberately paced procedural.

As usual, Airth takes his sweet time setting up the plot before making the pages fly at last.