About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

IN BITTER CHILL
by Sarah Ward
Minotaur, September 2015
310 pages
$25.95
ISBN: 0571320988


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

In a very cold Derbeyshire winter, police are called to a hotel where a woman lies dead, apparently a suicide. But why would the mother of Sophie Jenkins, a girl who was kidnapped and vanished without a trace back in 1978, leave her tidy bungalow, check into a hotel, and take a fatal overdose of Valium with alcohol? Had she simply grown tired of her lonely life, or does the answer lie in the past?

The suicide unsettles Rachel Jones, who was kidnapped along with Sophie but has no memory of what happened to her friend. All she knows is that a woman lured them both into her car. The next thing Rachel remembers is wandering in the woods, confused, before coming on a road and being rescued. Her friend was never found. Now Rachel recovers other people's histories through genealogical research and keeps an eye on her flamboyant grandmother who lives in a nursing home. On her website, she provides a sample of her work: a record of her matrilineal line. Following family history through its women is more challenging than through men, so it shows off her calm but dogged pursuit of connections through public records and family stories. When the case is reopened, so is the gaping hole in Rachel's own past.

For those who like British police procedurals that offer a complex human-sized puzzle without a lot of angst and high drama, IN BITTER CHILL fits the bill. In many ways it's a traditional British story that is closer to realistic crime fiction from the Nordic countries than to action-driven Hollywood-style thrillers. It features both a police procedural ensemble cast and something of an amateur sleuth in Rachel Jones – though she actually has some professional credentials that provide the police with pieces they are missing.

Ward nicely balances dramatic potential with restraint as she spins a story as complicated as a Golden Age mystery that involves train timetables. It demands a certain discipline to disentangle the plot threads, but it's clear that Sarah Ward respects both the mystery genre and her readers' capacity to participate with her detectives in figuring out what happened to two little girls many years ago.

§ Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.

Reviewed by Barbara Fister, October 2015

This book has more than one review. Click here to show all.

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]