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THE ENGLISH BOYS
by Julia Thomas
Midnight Ink, July 2016
336 pages
$15.99
ISBN: 0738749028


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Actor Daniel Richardson is devastated when Tamsyn, the bride-to-be of his best friend Hugh Ashton-Hunt, is found murdered just minutes before the wedding is to begin, not least because he had fallen in love with her before she and Hugh suddenly became a couple, but had never expressed his feelings.

There really isn't a mystery here in the usual sense, not because there are nearly no clues to follow but because the psychological suspense depends entirely upon no one except the one responsible having any idea what the motive could be.

What is quite obvious is that the guilty person has to be one of the twenty-seven family members or friends who were in the part of Westminster Abbey where she died during the very narrow time frame in which the murder has to have occurred.

Detective Chief Inspector Murray knows from long experience that if he sifts and resifts what evidence he has and interviews and re-interviews the twenty-seven suspects, that some ideas and some persons will be eliminated and that gradually something more to be investigated will be revealed. This, however successful eventually, is an excruciatingly slow process and Daniel and Tamsyn's younger sister Carey embark on an investigation of their own, as much as a defense against the hopelessness of dealing with their grief as anything else.

This is a tightly sequenced tale with the many flashbacks expertly woven in. And this is an accomplished author and a polished piece of writing.

If there is a flaw, it is in the ending. There is a break two and a half pages before the novel concludes and I found myself wishing that those two and a half pages hadn't been there -- something there falls flat but up to there it's a good ride.

§ Diana Borse is retired from teaching English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and savoring the chance to read as much as she always wanted to.

Reviewed by Diana Borse, July 2016

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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