Fri 15 May 2020
Reviewed by Barry Gardner: CYNTHIA HARROD-EAGLES – Grave Music.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[7] Comments
CYNTHIA HARROD-EAGLES – Grave Music. Inspector Bill Slider #3. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1995. Avon, paperback, 1996. Published previously in the UK as Dead End (Little Brown, hardover, 1994).
This is the third of the series I’ve read. I had some problems with the first, but thought the second was a bit better.
Life has been better for Inspector Bill Slider. His wife and mistress have left him more or less simultaneously. And his boss has hinted strongly that he should transfer. He hasn’t, and he’s paying for it. He and his ex-mistress, an orchestral musician, are thrown somewhat together again when a noted London conductor is murdered during a rehearsal. It’s one of those cases where the suspects include just about everyone who ever knew the dead man, who seems to have been thoroughly unlikable in every respect.
This is a series that seems to me to have gotten steadily better. Bill Slider is a genuinely likeable and sympathetic character, his one-time philandering notwithstanding, and so is his lover Joanna. Harrod-Eagles tells a good, straightforward story in prose equally so. Her characters and dialog are her strengths; her plot was serviceable, but the identity of the murderer seemed obvious early on.
These aren’t as gritty as John Harvey’s books, but they certainly aren’t light. I’d put them solidly in the mid-range of hard-edged British police stories.
The Inspector Bill Slider series —
1. Orchestrated Death (1991)
2. Death Watch (1992)
3. Necrochip (1993) US title: Death to Go.
4. Dead End (1994) US title: Grave Music.
5. Blood Lines (1996)
6. Killing Time (1996)
7. Shallow Grave (1998)
8. Blood Sinister (1999)
9. Gone Tomorrow (2001)
10. Dear Departed (2004)
11. Game Over (2008)
12. Fell Purpose (2010)
13. Body Line (2011)
14. Kill My Darling (2012)
15. Blood Never Dies (2012)
16. Hard Going (2013)
17. Star Fall (2014)
18. One Under (2015)
19. Old Bones (2016)
20. Shadow Play (2017)
21. Headlong (2018)
May 15th, 2020 at 10:52 pm
I had no idea that the series kept going on for so long after I stopped buying them, which was probably when Avon stopped publishing hem in paperback. I may be wrong about this, but I suspect that most of these have never even been published in the US.
I bought the ones I could, though, but I never took the time to read the ones I did. Barry Makes it sound as though I may have missed a bet there.
May 16th, 2020 at 8:11 am
Of course, Slider and the “ex-mistress” do get back together, eventually get married and have a child together, and he gets along better with the awful ex-wife once she remarries too.
The series is not as soapy as the previous paragraph might indicate. I like it a lot. I’ve read the first dozen and have several others on the shelf.
May 16th, 2020 at 9:18 am
Sounds like a second note in favor of the books, Jeff. I’ll see what I can do to locate one of the ones I have.
May 16th, 2020 at 12:51 pm
I read the first three, liked them, each better, then for no reason stopped. Too many other books, I guess. At one point I bought the omnibus volumes, about 3 books in each, and have always meant to start reading these again. Maybe this review will get me going. I kind of wish Jeff hadn’t given us all the spoilers, but I guess it doesn’t matter if there’s no suspense about those things.
May 16th, 2020 at 2:16 pm
Sorry, Rick, but really, they aren’t spoilers any more than reading the average dust jacket blurb. I should have thought of that, however.
May 16th, 2020 at 4:15 pm
No real harm done, I’m sure. Whether or not a lead character in a mystery series marries his ex-mistress is hardly one of the reasons I read detective stories anyway. It’s his life, not mine!
May 16th, 2020 at 5:38 pm
A series I dipped into until they became too hard to find. I suppose I ought to check them out again on Kindle.