RRP £6.99 Lowest New Price £0.28

Time Warner Paperbacks Number of pages: 352 Language: English (Original Language) Language: English (Unknown) Language: English (Published)

RRP: £6.99
Dear Departed - Whodunnit and humour - a pleasant potion
Review date: 2007-02-03 Rating: 8 out of 10


Cynthia Harrod-Eagles has shown herself to be the mistress of current humorous detective fiction.

Using the loose structure of a police procedural, she adds likeable well-differentiated police characters including a super whose appearance, mannerisms and vocabulary explore a rich comic vein.

The main character, DI Bill Slider, is realistic and humane and has his own family concerns which occasionally conflict with the job.

A young woman has been murdered in a London park. Is it the work of a serial killer or a specific targeted crime, and if so, how had the victim (a good person for once) attracted such a fate?

There is steady movement towards uncovering the true situation and you might well feel that all of this could really have happened - (not a certainty in this kind of fiction). Slider and his DS Atherton take some unorthodox steps to land the perpetrator and you will probably be kept guessing until the end.

As a bonus, the humour might make you laugh out loud. My only criticism? This is not the first book she has started with a murder in a park, and I nearly missed it because I thought I had read it before!