Old Bones

Starred review from December 19, 2016
Harrod-Eagles’s outstanding 19th outing for Det. Insp. Bill Slider and his team of London coppers (after 2016’s One Under) opens with Slider under suspicion of having leaked information to the press about a case involving his superiors in the department. He’s therefore assigned a cold case to keep him, as his boss says, “out of everyone’s hair. You can’t upset anybody looking into old bones.” The bones in question were found in the back garden of a London house and belong to a teenage girl; the medical examiner estimates she has been buried there for around 25 years. What was intended as mere busywork becomes, in the hands of diligent and determined Slider (who balances his idealism with an intimate understanding of the unfairness of life), much more complex and controversial. This admirable entry features a well-integrated cast of both sexes and is refreshingly free of innuendo about female police officers. Harrod-Eagles graces her narrative with a quiet wit that makes the book a pleasure to read.

December 1, 2016
Still smarting from the anonymous news leak that pitted him against his superiors (One Under, 2015), DCI Bill Slider lands a case so ancient that it "won't put anyone's toes out of joint." Well, yes and no.Toby and Nicola Freeling, digging in their garden in the Trees Estate, have made an unwelcome discovery: the skeletonized remains of a young girl. Whoever she was--and it takes the Met quite a while to identify her as Amanda Jane Knight, a 14-year-old who went missing 25 years ago--her body has been at rest for so long that the Freelings can't have been the ones who put here there. Since very few people are willing to take the initiative to bury a corpse in someone else's yard in a bustling middle-class neighborhood, suspicion naturally falls on Ronald Knight, Amanda's father, even though he's been dead seven years. Try as he might to see Knight as the sexual abuser and killer of his daughter, however, Slider fails, though he awakens disturbing possibilities in the imagination of Knight's widow, Margaret. The story of the murder, when it finally emerges from a killer who's "mad as a ferret in a blender," is considerably darker and more disturbing than you'd expect in a case for the ordinarily unflappable Slider. But as some consolation, the final chapter identifies the colleague who leaked the news of his earlier investigation to the press. Slow to get started--the opening chapters seem driven by a determination to indicate what every single member of the Shepherd's Bush constabulary is up to--but steadily increasing in momentum until the placidly ugly payoff: one of the author's best.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2017

It takes a lot to keep a series not just going but crackling after 18 books, but Harrod-Eagles does just that with this 19th installment of her London-set procedural series starring Det. Bill Slider. This time around, Slider, who's still smarting from the ramifications of One Under, investigates a cold case when the bones of a teenager are found by a young couple in their new garden.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2017
Bill Slider and his team of detectives are reconciling themselves to the fact that one of their most challenging casesyoung girls lured to sex-and-drug parties by some of the community's wealthiest and most respected men, including senior police officialshas been shelved for lack of firm evidence. It seems Slider's star witness, who saw one of her friends die after being thrown off the roof of the party house, has now decided she isn't sure. Slider is convinced it's a cover-up, but, in the meantime, human bones have been discovered in a shallow grave, and Slider's boss, the silver-tongued Porson, assigns the case to Slider and his team. At first, they take it as a mere distraction, especially once it's confirmed that the bones are more than two decades old. But as they investigate, they discover that this is no ordinary case. In an eerie parallel to their failed sex-and-drugs case, this one involves the tragic death of a teenager, and the story behind what is clearly murder is both tangled and horrific. As usual, Harrod-Eagles offers up a cracking police procedural that captures the trials and tribulationsof modern-day British policing and features characters that are as decent and diligent as they are flawed and human. Another sterling entry in a truly outstanding series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)