Killers in the Mansions

A Death in Diamonds by SJ Bennett | Zaffre | 288 pages | ₹ 1,912

For those who’ve enjoyed the first season of The Crown where young Elizabeth becomes the Queen, and has to cope with the high expectations of the public, a crumbling empire, and her roles as a mother and a wife, SJ Bennett’s first book in a new series will be a welcome read. In 1957, thirty-year-old Queen Elizabeth II has just returned from a successful state visit to France when a double murder takes place in a Mews house rented by the Dean of Bath. The Dean is a member of the Artemis Club along with the Duke of Edinburgh, half the aristocracy and most of the Cabinet. The Dean’s guests that night were a university professor, a circuit judge and a canon at Westminster Abbey. No man had been out of sight of the others for more than a matter of a few minutes.

The victims are identified as an Argentinian crook and a blonde escort from Raffles Escort Services. The girl’s body is laid out, decked with a tiara of diamonds and a posy of flowers in her hands while the Argentinian lies curled up on the floor with a stiletto stuck in his eye.

Is it a gang killing or is something more dire in the works? That’s the task of Detective Inspector Darbyshire and his lazy Sergeant, a boating champion. While Darbyshire is threatened by various forces who may be working for other branches of government, Queen Elizabeth needs to have her own sleuth in place. She has a private worry about her husband’s whereabouts that night. Enter ex-Bletchley codebreaker, Joan McGraw, now a lowly typist at the palace, who has her own secret about her Second World War stint. Working class, doughty, meticulous Joan with a photographic memory and an aunt who tailors designer outfits, is an instant hit with the Queen when she is brought in as a stand-in for a secretary.

Queen Elizabeth decides to trust Joan with the assignment: find out which of the three courtiers (all men) in her office is fomenting embarrassments such as oysters served to her during a state visit (a banned item for its propensity to trigger an upset tummy), spiking her face cream with itching powder, and sneaking in unsuitable invitees into official do’s.

As Joan digs deeper, she realises that there are others who don’t want the truth to come out and who will do anything, even kill, to keep it that way. The Queen’s position and perhaps even her life may be in danger, something our sleuth, Queen Elizabeth II is aware of and takes the precautions.

Bennett does a fantastic job of keeping us rooted in the historical era—getting the details right about world events—while never losing track of the suspenseful story. The pace is smooth and the point of view moves from the Queen to Joan and back. We also get a juicy bit character in Daphne Du Maurier who, it seems, was the person Prince Philip went to for advice before proposing to Elizabeth. She also helps the Queen compose her first Christmas TV address to the nation. We see the queen from Daphne’s perspective, as a woman, a mother, a wife and above all, a sovereign determined to show no fragility. Yet, it is fragility her subjects demand of her.

Bennett’s writing is smooth, and her story has the right balance of suspense and complexity. What a pleasurable read— to while away a weekend in the company of the queen, Joan and royal England.

The Silence in Her Eyes by Armando Lucas Correa | Atria Books | 272 pages | ₹ 2,066

This Hitchcockean thriller with shades of Rear Window and The Silent Patient is an intense and thought-provoking read for a summer afternoon. Leah has Akinetopsia—motion blindness. She can only see stationary objects — anything in motion she is blind to. But it doesn’t mean she is blind; she loves reading, and only has to keep her eyes closed when she turns the page.

Leah lives alone on Morningside Heights, opposite Columbia University in the apartment she grew up in. Narrated in first person, we quickly learn about her world, those she loves (a beloved nanny), she spends time with (an elderly neighbour and her housekeeper), someone she is attracted to (a delivery boy), her only friend (Mark who is in the creative writing programme at Columbia and works at the local bookstore where she spends her mornings), and someone she’s wary of (her psychiatrist).

She enjoys her acute sense of hearing in the daytime, but at night, it is torture since she can hear her neighbours even two floors down. Then a new neighbour moves in next door—a pretty woman her age who has separated from a rich husband. Leah hears her sob through the paper-thin walls and hears her tell someone on the phone not to harass her. After hearing a fight and sounds of a crash, a worried Leah befriends the neighbour, Alice. It is an unhappy split, Alice says, and reveals she is afraid her husband wants to kill her. Then someone enters Leah’s apartment at night — a man smelling of bergamot. It terrifies her. She becomes obsessed with the thought that it is Alice’s husband and he wants to kill her and Alice, a fear her new friend voices.

Leah in The Silence in Her Eyes enjoys her acute sense of hearing in the daytime, but at night, it is torture since she can hear her neighbours even two floors down. Then a new neighbour moves in next door—a pretty woman her age who has separated from a rich husband

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The seductive, dark, and crisp writing encloses us in Leah’s psyche. We feel her isolation, her anxiety about Alice and her own safety, and the disorientation triggered by her acute hearing and sense of smell. This brooding, surreal thriller will keep you gripped till the satisfying twist in the final pages.

End of Story by AJ Finn | Hemlock Press | 416 pages | ₹499

A reclusive crime fiction writer, Sebastian Trapp, invites Nicky Hunter, a detective fiction expert to write his biography. Nicky jumps at the chance to meet the author of her favourite series and wonders if Trapp will reveal something about the sudden disappearance of his first wife and teenage son twenty years ago. Did Trapp commit the perfect crime, she wonders, and soon becomes obsessed with finding out the true story.

The cast of characters in Trapp’s gothic San Francisco mansion include his second wife, Diana, who used to be the first wife’s assistant, a protective daughter Madeleine, and a feckless nephew Freddie. The events are narrated by Nicky and Madeleine. As Nicky, caught in the throes of detective fever, digs deeper into the mystery of what happened to the first wife and son, and Madeleine begins to suspect that her father might know more about her mother’s disappearance, another body is found in the Koi Pond. Someone who says he is her long-lost brother sends Madeleine messages on the phone and uses a nickname only the two of them knew. Nicky finds the teenager’s old diary, and watches the home movies that capture key moments in the family’s life. As she pieces together the past, the bullying and the fractious relationship between father and son, Nicky realises that the past has indeed come back to haunt them.

Finn’s debut, The Woman in the Window, was brilliantly Hitchcockian and well paced. End of Story is less so. It begins slowly, and while the characters are fleshed out well, the mystery is not as compelling. The writing is tight, but somewhat idiosyncratic, almost film-like, for example, “She cuts her eyes to the rear-view mirror.”

The clever repartee between Nicky and Trapp, complete with quotes from old mystery novels by Christie, Chandler, Doyle and some lesser-known authors that only crime fiction devotees would know and appreciate, defuses the pace. Fortunately, before it becomes too much, Finn reins it in and allows the story to unfurl its emotional core. A satisfying twist at the end, apt for our times, questions our societal assumptions and prejudices.

End of Story, like some other recent books, is an ode to crime fiction, to the art of storytelling, and to the fictional universes we craft for our own life stories.

About The Author

Shylashri Shankar

Shylashri Shankar is the author of Turmeric Nation - A Passage Through India's Tastes