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Inspector Gemma James is pregnant with Scotland Yard Inspector Duncan Kincaid's baby. He surprises her with a house near the Notting Hill station from which she works. She is called to the scene of a murder. The beautiful young wife of an antiques dealer is found with her throat cut and a single knife wound to her chest. Her much older husband, Karl Arrowood, is, of course, a suspect. Dawn was pregnant. Karl has had a vasectomy. Her lover, Alex Dunn, a porcelain dealer in the Portobello market, was probably the father of the baby and he becomes a suspect when he mysteriously disappears right after the murder. Kincaid does some research and finds that another antiques dealer, Marianne Hoffman, was found murdered in the same fashion outside her shop, and then, Karl is found dead, with his throat slashed but without the chest wound. It would help if Deborah Crombie actually spent more time in London. She weaves a story of the Notting Hill area in the days just after WW II and today, but the changes, from slum to middle class to posh, are not made clear. In the 1960s, the streets about which she writes were some of the most dangerous in London. The area was the center of the London drugs trade. If you have seen the movie "Performance" then you will know what All Saint's Road looked like 35 years ago. There was barbed wire in the streets. The book opens with Dawn going to the Vet on All Saint's Road, then home and getting her car andgoing shopping at Harrod's, then proceding to her doctor, presumably on Harley Street, and then having tea with her friend at Fortnum's. Surface traffic in London moves at about 2 1/2 miles an hour. Besides the fact that very few Londoners shop at Harrod's, her itinerary is impossible. She would have to criss-cross London, find parking, and still make her appointments. (A Londoner wouldn't bother to have tea at Fortnum's either. The restaurant there is rather down market and touristy. They would probably meet at Brown's) Then, after she is killed, her husband finds her body by seeing a "white Harrod's carry bag" As far as I know, Harrod's bags are green. Crombie also tries to bring in the Profumo affair of 1962. However, although a notorious Notting Hill slumlord was involved with one of the girls, the famed house of assignation was in Marylebone, near Harley Street, not in Notting Hill. She is also somewhat out of date in her understanding of the antiques market scene in London. I was disappointed in Kissed a Sad Goodbye. I felt that Crombie had used some sketchy London references. In this one, she used a couple of local histories, the Notting Hill website (http://www.portowebbo.co.uk/) and the ubiquitous London A-Z. Crombie is a very slick writer and creates engaging characters. Why she didn't place them in somewhere in Texas, where she lives, is beyond me.
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, November 2002
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