Dead Heading

Starred review from April 7, 2014
Nobody tops Aird at police procedurals imbued with sly British humor, as shown in her 24th mystery featuring Calleshire County Det. Insp. C.D. Sloan (after 2011’s Past Tense). In separate inquiries, Sloan must determine who opened the greenhouse doors at two nurseries, freezing many orchids, and learn why the elderly Miss Enid Maude Osgathorp, who was planning an orchid demonstration, has not returned from a trip. Blackmail and murder trump vandalism as Sloan finds links between the two cases. All the characters, from the nursery owners to the nearby landscape architect to several nursery clients, are clearly defined, believable, and human enough to gum up the works here and there. Sloan, whose mordant thoughts in the face of his superior’s outré remarks are worth the price of admission, is assisted—or perhaps handicapped—by the presence of Detective Constable Crosby, he of the heavy foot on the gas pedal and the inability to curb his inappropriate comments. Agent: Cassie Metcalf-Slovo, Aitken Alexander (U.K.).

May 1, 2014
The Calleshire constabulary investigates a number of puzzling crimes that simply must be connected.DI Sloan and his intellectually challenged helper, DC Crosby, are called to a plant nursery owned by Jack Haines. Someone has broken through a fence and left two greenhouse doors open, killing a number of valuable plants, many of them orchids. Oddly, another small nursery's orchids have been ruined in the same way, and an expert on orchids has been reported missing. Miss Enid Osgathorp, for years the local physician's receptionist, has failed to return from the most recent of her many trips. A landscape architect who gave Osgathorp a ride to catch her train is also suffering from the plant murders, since many of the victims were special orders for several projects he was working on. Sloan and Crosby find that two different people have broken into the Osgathorp cottage. Despite an all-out hunt, the lady in question remains stubbornly missing. But Sloan does discover that Osgathorp was a blackmailer who used the information she had garnered from her former job to supplement her income nicely. In addition, he finds a link between the greenhouse owners-a man who is stepson to one of them and ex-husband to the other-but he soon turns up dead. Someone is desperate to conceal something, but what? That's the question Sloan must answer to please his irascible superintendent before his annual assessment.All the dry wit of Aird's very British police procedurals (Past Tense, 2011, etc.) is joined this time by an especially tricky mystery.

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June 1, 2014

Detectives Sloan and Crosby deal with a case of greenhouse sabotage that has ruined a huge cash crop of exotic plants. Soon a missing person complicates the situation further. A solid, yet fresh British procedural (after Past Tense) in a series that has been running since 1966.

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