Enter Pale Death

Starred review from October 6, 2014
British author Cleverly’s excellent 12th whodunit featuring Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner Joe Sandilands (after 2013’s A Spider in the Cup) offers her sleuth a number of genuinely baffling crimes to solve. In June 1933, Sir James Truelove, a government minister expected to become the next Home Secretary and thereby Sandilands’s new boss, asks him to help retrieve a pair of family portraits that are up for sale at a London auction house. Truelove hopes that the presence of a uniformed copper will deter other bidders. Despite misgivings about whether he’s been given the full story, Sandilands complies and lands the artwork. Meanwhile, an anonymous letter writer advises Sandilands to look beyond the official verdict of “death by misadventure” of a titled lady killed by a dangerous stallion in the stables at Truelove’s family estate in Cambridge three months earlier. A 16-year-old girl’s suicide by drowning and an unreported theft, both dating to 1908, raise the stakes. Cleverly manages to pull everything together logically, with more than a few surprises. Agent: Juliet Burton, Juliet Burton Literary Agency (U.K.).

Narrator Matthew Brenher sounds wonderfully at home in 1930s London and in the country house of Sir James Truelove. These are the locales where most of the action takes place in the twelfth outing for policeman Joe Sandilands. Lady Lavinia is killed in her own stables by a newly acquired stallion. Phoebe, a servant of the house, committed suicide more than two decades previously. An anonymous letter to Sandilands suggests that both deaths are the result of foul play. Brenher effortlessly negotiates the subtle class nuances among the servants and local police and the less subtle differences among their masters. Cleverly's plotting keeps the listener guessing to the end. C.A.T. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine