The Detective's Secret

March 20, 2017
Thomson’s third book featuring professional cleaner and amateur sleuth Stella Darnell (after Ghost Girl) is less successful than its predecessors in making her detecting plausible. Stella, who works for the London-based Clean Slate, is approached by William Frost, who’s heard that “apart from cleaning, solves murders.” William’s brother, Rick, died a month earlier after supposedly jumping in front of an Underground train, a clear case of suicide according to the authorities. William is convinced someone pushed his brother, and Stella agrees to help find the culprit. Her inquiries are aided by the convenient coincidence that Rick’s death was witnessed by her friend and partner in detection, Jack Harmon. Jack, who has the annoying habit of reciting childish rhymes, was supervising a novice train engineer on a neighboring track, but didn’t see anything helpful. Heavy-handed foreshadowing (“Had Jack looked at the plane tree where he had been standing moments earlier, he would have seen he was wrong in thinking that no one was watching him”) is a drawback.