All My Enemies

July 13, 2009
First published in the U.K. in 1996, the engrossing third entry in Maitland's series to feature David Brock and Kathy Kolla (Spider Trap
, etc.) is at last available in the U.S. The day before Kathy begins her new job in Scotland Yard's Serious Crime Branch, she gets a call from her superior, Chief Inspector Brock, that her detective services are needed sooner than expected. Angela Hannaford, a pleasant young woman who taught Sunday school, has been brutally stabbed to death in her parents' South London home, her face mutilated. Kathy, who becomes the head of the investigating team, traces clues to other recent murders of women who all eerily resemble one another, and soon discovers that a theater troupe may be the critical link in the Hannaford case. But as Kathy moves closer to finding the perpetrator, she also inches closer to danger. Maitland does a fine job developing complex, interesting characters within a sinister, well-paced plot.

July 15, 2009
While completists wait for October and Kathy Kolla's latest case (Dark Mirror), they can savor the 1996 novel that introduced her to the Met's Serious Crime Division, though not yet to the United States.

If London clerk-typist Angela Hannaford thought of her flat in Kent as a refuge from the City, she was dead wrong. Someone assaulted her and stabbed her 40 times, continuing even after she'd died. The ghoulish murder is a welcoming present for Kathy, who now officially reports to longtime colleague DCI David Brock (Spider Trap, 2007, etc.). All but officially running the case, she concentrates on Tom Gentle, the coworker who'd bought Angela's extra ticket for Macbeth the evening she died but then didn't go with her. So invested does Kathy become in Gentle's guilt that she's deeply chagrined when he produces a convincing alibi for one of several earlier murders to which Serious Crime has linked this one. However, another lead turns even hotter when Kathy, investigating what she's convinced is the unconnected disappearance of a middle-aged actress, ends up in the middle of an amateur theatrical company whose repertory provides an uncanny road map to the Hannaford case. As Kathy deals with an unsolicited, open-ended visit from her Aunt Mary, she bears down on a second suspect who's equally defiant. The solution, like the best of Maitland's Chinese-box puzzles, adds new twists that turn the case even darker.

Average for this outstanding series—in other words, a must-read for fans of the British procedural, with a hair-raising denouement.

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

August 1, 2009
Here is the long overdue third David Brock and Kathy Kolla mystery (originally published in 1996 but just now available here). It serves as a kind of prequel, with Kathy officially joining Davids New Scotland Yard Serious Crime Division and starting her new job with a particularly tricky case. A woman is murdered, but she appears to have been killed in an elaborate, seemingly rehearsed manner, as though the killer were acting out a murderous script. Kollas inquiry soon leads her to a local theater group, but can a bunch of actors really be using scripts to commit murder? Fans of this fine series will be thrilled that this lost novel has finally arrived in the U.S. and will enjoy the opportunity to go back to an earlier time in the lives of these characters and see their relationship at a more tentative stage. Yes, the fact that the book is way out of sequence will bother those who prefer reading crime series in chronological order, but even those readers should have no trouble settling in and enjoying Maitlands typically fine prose and engaging characters.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)