LUCRETIA GRINDLE – So Little to Die For.   Pocket, paperback original; 1st printing, October 1994.

LUCRETIA GRINDLE

   One might imagine that Lucretia Grindle is too good to be a mystery author’s real name, but if so, one would be wrong. And since her first two books are decidedly British (with a bit of Scottish thrown in) one might imagine that she is from England, or Scotland, but no, she was born in Massachusetts and went to Dartmouth — a native New Englander.

   And speaking of her first two books, of which this is the second, both cases are solved by the strong, diligent police work of one Chief Inspector Ross. The first was The Killing of Ellis Martin (Pocket, 1993), then this one, then nothing. Until this year, that is, or 2003, when Grindle’s most recent thriller. a book entitled The Nightspinners, came out, complete with no Inspector Ross.

   The Nightspinners is quite a total change of direction, as a matter of fact. It appears to be a semi-psychic psychodrama about two twins who can communicate with other — and then one is murdered.

   As for the Ross books — no strike that, as I’ve only read the one, but the one I have read is a straight-forward detective story. One in which two married couples are brutally murdered while vacationing in a small isolated cottage along the English-Scottish border. Ross, who is vacationing in the area, happens also to be one of the last few persons to see them alive.

   Incidentally, for whatever it might be worth, the two women who happen to be among the victims are also twins, but so far as I can tell, this small fact has little or no bearing on the story. They could be sisters, and it would make no difference.

LUCRETIA GRINDLE

   The story is strong on both setting and atmosphere. I’ll chance it and submit you to a longish sort of quote, from page 48:

    Ross stood by the headstone and listened to the silence that ran down the glen. As his ear became accustomed, he picked out the slow and steady burble of a highland stream, a burn running its way down from the hills to the loch below. From where he stood he could see the roof of the Rob Roy Hotel across the loch. … Somewhere, the lane wound down [the edge of the outcropping of rock] and ended at the farm where Rob Roy had brought his family to barricade himself into the hills and fight out his life, the place where, not seventy-two hours ago, blood had been spilled again in a frenzy of rage and terror. Here, in the chosen place of a man who had lived and died by the sword, Ross strongly felt the presence of violence. It echoed back to him over centuries and again over days.

   This is a not a cozy, in other words, nor a murder that depends strongly on the domestic lives of those involved, one in which the circle of evidence circles in, but rather one in which the path of the investigation spirals outward instead.

   Ross has the instincts of a true policeman, however. Here’s another quote, this time from page 129:

LUCRETIA GRINDLE

    As far as he was concerned, every murderer left a trail; all you had to do was find it. Sometimes you did so through dumb luck, sometimes through common sense. Other times you never found it, but not because it wasn’t there. Then there were the investigations that resembled bird-watching: you sat in the right place without moving and you looked and looked, and then suddenly you saw something. The trick might be finding the right point of observation, or simply knowing what to look for. Most often, Ross thought, it was neither. It was a matter of recognizing what it was that you were looking at, understanding what sat before your very eyes.

   The very neat, dovetailed plot gradually takes shape and comes into focus for a instant or two before being allowed to squander itself into a rather inept made-for-TV-movie showdown with the villain(s) involved.

   Grimes tries to make amends with some pleasant jiggery-pokery later, but — the word I’m looking for is “uneven” — and with this second effort, we’re likely to have seen the last of the slightly stodgy but still likable Inspector Ross.

— June 2003

[UPDATE] 01-10-10.   I don’t remember this one at all, I’m sorry to say. It sounds as though I might enjoy it! Or parts of it, at least.

   Also of note, I hope, since this review was written, Ms. Grindle has written two more books, both of which seem to be criminous in nature: The Faces of Angels (2006) and The Villa Triste (2010).