Death's Dark Shadow

January 27, 2014
Spencer’s well-executed seventh Monika Paniatowski mystery (after 2013’s A Walk With The Dead) takes the Whitebridge detective chief inspector and her adopted daughter, Louisa, to Spain, where Louisa meets relatives and Monika looks up her retired colleague and mentor, Charlie Woodend (the star of another Spencer police series). While there, Louisa meets Doña Elena, who has a tragic story. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, she spat on one of Franco’s officers when he made her an indecent proposal. Doña Elena paid dearly for this insult—with the loss of her husband and baby son, and a 10-year prison sentence. Soon after Monika and Louisa return home to Whitebridge, an unidentified body is found floating in a canal. A second gruesome murder raises the stakes in a case that has its roots in Spain. Charlie winds up helping Monika unravel a twisted tale of wartime love, loss, greed, and betrayal.

March 1, 2014

Dona Elena never regains sure footing after suffering the worst possible atrocities, including the abduction of her infant child, during the Spanish Civil War. When Franco's long dictatorial reign finally ends with his death in 1975, she escapes to England, having learned recently a key detail about her family. Unfortunately, she becomes a victim again and is murdered in Whitebridge; DCI Monika Paniatowski investigates. Monika's local contacts know more about Elena than they let on, and she is led a bit astray. It's only by engaging her former mentor, DCI Charlie Woodend (who has retired in Spain), that Monika manages to tie together an extraordinarily painful story that spans several decades. VERDICT Case number seven (after A Walk with the Dead) is a quietly compelling story for those intrigued by war crimes and the resulting fallout. Spencer's admirable Paniatowski character has spun off strongly from the popular DCI Woodend series.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2014
A family trip to Spain has far-reaching consequences for DCI Monika Paniatowski (A Walk with the Dead, 2013, etc.). Although she's fearful that it will undermine her relationship with her adopted daughter, Monika knows that it's time for the girl to meet her birth mother's relatives. So the two travel to Calpe, Spain, where Louisa is feted by her auntie, Pilar, while Monika catches up with her old friends the Woodends, who've retired to the Costa Blanca. The next day, something unthinkable happens: Pilar's lifelong friend Dona Elena, a widow in her 70s, leaves the village outside Calpe where she's spent her whole life and buys a ticket to England--where her dead body is eventually found in a canal. That canal, of course, is in Whitebridge, making Elena's death Monika's problem. She's been on her boss's bad list ever since Chief Constable George Baxter's wife, who was pathologically jealous of Monika, killed herself in a car crash. Now the pressure to find Elena's killer is intense. Monika knows that Elena was in England to see Robert Martinez, Whitebridge's first-ever Hispanic MP. But she suspects that the roots of Elena's murder date back to her involvement with anti-Franco forces in Spain. Tracing Elena's history will take eyes and ears in Spain--so who better to recruit that Charlie Woodend, who's teamed up with retired cop Paco Ruiz to form Ojos y Oidos: Agencia de detectives? What looks like an open-and-shut case ends with twists nobody will see coming in Spencer's most in-your-face outing for Monika yet.

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