The Final Curtain

August 5, 2013
In British author Masters’s well-paced 11th Joanna Piercy mystery (after 2012’s A Velvet Scream), the newlywed detective inspector faces two professional challenges: her exasperation with the nuisance calls from Timony Weeks, a child TV star in the 1960s, and the imminent arrival of a new, by-the-book chief superintendent. Is Weeks batty or is someone trying to intimidate her? How much of the Leek Police resources can be devoted to investigating her calls? The complaints become increasingly unsettling, yet Piercy’s efforts to identify likely suspects and a motive are stymied by Weeks and her companion, Diana Tong. Not until a murder occurs late in the book can Piercy devote full resources and attention to the events at remote Butterfield Farm, a recreation of the location where the TV series in which Weeks starred was filmed more than 40 years earlier. Attentive readers are likely to guess the victim and to narrow the list of suspects before the denouement, but Masters produces surprises to the end.

April 4, 2011
In chapter one of Masters's gripping third mystery featuring intuitive, no-nonsense coroner Martha Gunn (after 2007's Slip Knot), a middle-aged woman, Alice Sedgewick, brings in the desiccated remains of an infant boy to the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital. Polite yet eerily vacant, Alice insists she found the newborn in her home. Martha, whose job it is to find out not only who has died but where and how, has her hands full, and the police, under Det. Insp. Alex Randall's curt and decisive guidance, fan out to interview a host of colorful yet recalcitrant suspects, including Alice's domineering and blustery husband as well as the previous owners of Alice's house, an arrogant couple who now live in Spain. The widowed Martha's conversations with her spirited teenage twin daughters, her interactions with troubled friends, and her relationship with the enigmatic Alex hold considerable interest. Clues, lined up like golden crumbs, lure the reader to a surprising conclusion.