Death of a Cave Dweller

June 1, 2000
In the early 1960s, just as his band is becoming famous, lead guitarist Eddie Barnes is electrocuted on stage at a Liverpool club. The Liverpool police drop this baffling crime on Scotland Yard, where it lands in the laps of quirky chief inspector Charlie Woodend and level-headed sergeant Bob Rutter. Faced with finding the shadowy killer amid the frenetic Liverpool rock scene, Woodend and Rutter find themselves in a race against the clock. Although Spencer is relatively unheralded among authors of British police procedurals, she deserves a much wider audience. Her characters are diverse, intriguing, and believable; her plots never fail to surprise; and the procedural details are grittily realistic. Spencer's gift for incorporating historic detail in her crime dramas--in this case, Liverpool and English urban life before the Beatles--is reminiscent of the way Max Allan Collins uses Chicago in his Nate Heller mysteries. Recommend Spencer confidently to anyone who enjoys the British procedural. ((Reviewed June 1 & 15, 2000))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)