Dark Mirror

Starred review from August 10, 2009
When Ph.D. student Marion Summers collapses and dies in the London Library in the excellent ninth entry in Maitland's series featuring Kathy Kolla, newly promoted to detective inspector, and Det. Chief Insp. David Brock (Spider Trap
, etc.), everyone assumes her diabetes is to blame. But when arsenic is discovered in Summers's system, Kolla takes charge of her first investigation. As part of her thesis, Summers was researching the 19th-century avant-garde painters and poets known as the Pre-Raphaelites. Summers had recently become obsessed with poisons, particularly arsenic, and her theories concerning its role in the lives of the Pre-Raphaelites had caused tensions among her academic peers. With Brock's help, Kolla digs deeper into the young woman's life and uncovers an unsettling past and numerous suspects who may have wished her harm. Maitland crafts a suspenseful whodunit with enough twists and turns to keep even the sharpest readers on their toes.

September 15, 2009
Researching eminent Victorians can be dangerous, DI Kathy Kolla realizes; you can end up as dead as they are, and by the same means.

Titian-haired Marion Summers, a doctoral student in European literature, collapses one morning on arriving at the London Library. The cause of her death, according to pathologist Sundeep Mehta, was arsenic, a poison so seldom used by contemporary criminals that it seems a relic from the 19th century. Investigating possible sources of the poison, Kathy begins to see that Marion's demise echoes in disturbingly literal ways the subject of her research: the interlocking relationships among Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters—as well as, it turns out, some of their murderous Victorian contemporaries. Although Marion's brutish stepfather Keith Rafferty and creepy stalker Nigel Ogilvie inject a note of tawdry modernity into the proceedings, the truth behind her death seems related to her academic connections to Dr. Anthony da Silva, her dissertation supervisor, and biographer Sophie Warrender, for whom Marion worked as a part-time researcher. As usual, Maitland delights in revealing layer upon layer of skullduggery. While Kathy's detective work slowly reveals"a murderess acting as a kind of hidden agent within the Pre-Raphaelite circle," Marion's case, first classified as murder, later seems more likely a suicide until a second, virtually identical death points the finger at murder once more.

Like All My Enemies (2009), average for this distinguished series. But Kathy's fans, presented with two installments of her adventures in two months, can hardly complain.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

August 15, 2009
Newly promoted Detective Inspector Kathy Kolla of the Serious Crimes Squad ("No Trace") is asked to look into a student's fatal poisoning. The case rapidly becomes a complex probe into the life of Marion Summers and her research involving the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and William Morris in particular. She has been poisoned with arsenic, almost impossible to obtain now but used widely by the Victorians in everything from paint to medicine. VERDICT Maitland, one of the most underrated British writers of the police procedural (he now lives in Australia and has won the Ned Kelly Award), weaves a complicated tale involving the past as much as the present. For procedural fans.

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.