Death in Disguise

June 22, 2015
The Whitebridge Players resurrect themselves for a revival of Thomas Kyd’s play The Spanish Tragedy—20 years after their last performance and the closing of the local theater—in Spencer’s dark ninth Monica Paniatowski mystery (after 2014’s Supping with the Devil). One of the troupe’s members, Mark Cotton, is now a highly paid TV actor, playing a detective chief inspector of all things, while a second, Sarah Audley, is poised to do the same and wants to model her character after Monika. When one of the leads is murdered on opening night, there’s no shortage of suspects and a demand from the powers-that-be to solve the case quickly. Despite her own reservations and those of her colleagues, Monika is determined to see the case through to the bitter end as egos, lust, betrayals (old and new), and hidden motives abound. Spencer hits the mark once again with a murky, engaging plot and a cadre of quirky, troubled characters.

June 1, 2016
When a woman's body is found in the most expensive suite at Whitebridge's ritzy Royal Victoria Hotel, the case falls to DCI Monika Paniatowski and her team. There's no identification on the woman or in her room, but the hotel manager says she registered as Mary Edwards and paid cash up front. This slightly unusual fact, combined with the discovery that the clothes in her closet were two distinctly different typessome cheap, some very expensiveleads Monika to conclude that the woman wanted to disguise herself and perhaps hide the real reason she was in Whitebridge. Eventually, Monika's sidekick, Jack Crane, digs out the clue that finally unlocks the puzzle when he discovers that the victim had visited the Whitebridge library to research a decades-old murder case. As the clues finally start to make sense, a tragic story is revealed, and the victim is finally avenged in a most unexpected way. A gripping plot, twists aplenty, good pacing, and the tough yet vulnerable Monika make this an engrossing read in Spencer's British procedural series set in the 1970s.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)