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Summary
Summary
"Rennie Airth is one of the best detective writers around. And The Death of Kings is his best book yet."--Philip Kerr, New York Times bestselling author of The Other Side of Silence
In the fifth novel in the critically acclaimed John Madden series, the former Scotland Yard detective returns in a gripping post-World War II mystery that will delight fans of Philip Kerr
On a hot summer day in 1938, a beautiful actress is murdered on the grand Kent estate of Sir Jack Jessup, close friend of the Prince of Wales. The arrest of an ex-convict and his subsequent confession swiftly bring the case to a close, but in 1949, the reappearance of a jade necklace raises questions about the murder. Was the man convicted and executed the decade before truly guilty?
Though happily retired from the police force, John Madden is persuaded to investigate the case afresh. In a story of honor and justice that takes Madden through the idyllic English countryside, post-war streets of London, and into the criminal underworld of the Chinese Triads, The Death of Kings is an atmospheric and captivating police procedural.
Author Notes
Rennie Airth was born in South Africa and worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters news service for many years. The first novel in his John Madden mystery series, River of Darkness , won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for best international crime novel of 2000 and was nominated for Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity awards.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The strangulation murder of actress Portia Blake in Kent, in 1938, propels Edgar-finalist Airth's excellent fifth John Madden mystery (after 2014's The Reckoning). In 1949, Angus Sinclair, formerly a chief inspector, now retired, asks Madden, who has left London's Metropolitan Police, to reinvestigate the crime. Although Owen Norris, an itinerant farmworker with a history of violence against women, confessed to Blake's murder and was executed, Sinclair is unsettled to receive an anonymous letter suggesting that Norris was innocent. The letter includes a jade pendant purporting to be the one that disappeared from the corpse. Despite his lack of any official status, Madden agrees to poke around quietly into the old case, in the hopes of finding sufficient evidence to warrant the police reopening it. The passage of time and the intervening deaths of people who could have shed light on what happened make this a daunting task. Golden age fans looking to pit their wits against a savvy sleuth will be more than satisfied. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary Agency. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
A jade necklace supposedly recovered from a 1939 murder case raises red flags 10 years later for former Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Sinclair, who calls his retired colleague, John Madden, into action in this fifth entry to the series, following The Reckoning (2014). A house party at the Kent country estate of Sir Jack Jessup turned tragic with the shocking murder of a guest on the grounds, actress Portia Blake, who was last seen flaunting the pendant in question. As Madden immerses himself in the case and delves into Portia's life, the pernicious tentacles of a larger picture emerge. Why were an actress and the Chinese businessman, Mr. Wing, invited to the party? Was the man convicted of the murder actually guilty? A procedural and a fairly straightforward puzzler become utterly absorbing and psychologically intriguing by virtue of the characters' personalities and unusual motivations. One can't help but compare Madden to other chief inspectors, like Armand Gemache in Louise Penny's Three Pines mysteries or Reginald Wexford in the series by Ruth Rendell, set in fictional Kingsmarkham, England.--Baker, Jen Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
At age 60, Dan Chase figures he has outrun all his old enemies. But then a car seems to be following him while he's walking his dogs, and a man with a gun turns up outside his house later that night - and Chase realizes that he's let his defenses drop since he settled into a quiet life in rural New England. A flashback reveals that he made off with close to $20 million after an aborted Special-Ops mission in Libya. Although he's tried to return the money, the government considers him a traitor and a murderer. "Once you run, there isn't any possibility of not running," he explains to the woman who becomes his companion on this harrowing hunt-andhide adventure, which takes them up Bear Mountain, then racing back down on skis, pursued by six armed men on snowmobiles and another assassin in a chopper. Nobody writes chase scenes like Perry, who devises intricate itineraries, multiple identities and frequent costume changes for Chase and Zoe McDonald, who rents him an apartment in suburban Chicago and winds up sharing his bed. "Running away with him is more fun than most people have in a lifetime," Zoe tells her worried daughter, who tries to talk her out of hitting the road with a reckless old man. But Chase is old "in the way a seven-foot rattlesnake was old," and Zoe proves to be a natural at destroying evidence, switching personalities and handling a Beretta. It takes a lot of ingenuity to get these fugitives across the country and into Canada without being plugged by hired killers or caught by one of the smart government agents who are all "too fast, too young and too strong," not to mention adept at the kind of procedural "tricks and traps" that didn't exist when Chase gave up the game - if anyone ever really gives up the game for good. THE CHINESE AUTHOR Chan Ho-kei takes on the staggering task of covering 50 years of Hong Kong's criminal past in THE BORROWED (Black Cat, paper, $16). This episodic novel, translated by Jeremy Tiang, derives its historical sweep from the career of the famed detective Kwan Chundok, who is on his deathbed when the story opens but becomes progressively younger as the chapters unfold in reverse chronology. Viewed from the perspective of Kwan's protégé, Inspector Sonny Lok, each of the six stories reflects the city at a time of social or political upheaval, including the handover from Britain to the People's Republic in 1997 and the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Inspector Kwan ("the genius detective") solves each crime - from domestic murders to turf wars among organized crime triads - by applying his superior powers of deductive reasoning. In this, the author hews to tradition, but you need to be a genius yourself to solve his confounding puzzle mysteries. THE BEAUTIFUL DEAD (Atlantic Monthly, $25) is something of a misstep for Belinda Bauer, whose suspense novels usually have a sly touch of the macabre. This one comes closer to a conventional woman-in-peril narrative, with a plot that features a young television reporter who catches the eye of a serial killer. Eve Singer is with iWitness News, assigned to the "meat beat," a never-ending spectacle of "bodies, black bags and bloodstains." Eve's stalled career seems to get a boost when a murderer singles her out from the press pack - until he starts stalking her. "We both crave death," he tells her, "and an audience." That's a tired conceit, and Bauer doesn't do much with it. But she can still turn a phrase (Eve's pet hamster rushes into his wheel "as if it were a getaway car") and write a tense scene (like the one that has Eve witnessing a murder in the London Underground), so we trust she'll be up to form next time. THERE WILL ALWAYS be civilized weekend parties in grand old English mansions, especially on the threshold (or in the aftermath) of a world war. And so it is in THE DEATH OF KINGS (Viking, $27), Rennie Airth's new mystery featuring Inspector John Madden, who comes out of retirement to reopen an old murder case at Foxley Hall, the stately home once presided over by Sir Jack Jessup. There, back in the summer of 1938, an actress named Portia Blake went for a walk in the woods and was murdered, supposedly by a man who confessed and recanted but was later hanged for the crime. Now it's 1949, and the jade pendant she was wearing on the day of the killing has been sent to the Canterbury police. Vestiges of the war always make their way into Airth's novels. "It's like the war never ended," a housewife says of the persistent food rationing. And in contrast to bucolic scenes that have hop pickers harvesting in the fields, there are startling glimpses of the bombed-out port of Rotterdam and heavily targeted British cities like Canterbury, the dumping ground for any bombs left over from the Luftwaffe's forays over London. Airth knows not to overdo the historical background; he gives us just enough to see this period whodunit from a wider perspective.
Guardian Review
The Book of Mirrors by EO Chirovici; The Trophy Child by Paula Daly; The Death of Kings by Rennie Airth; The Intrusions by Stav Sherez; Blue Light Yokohama by Nicolas Obregon The first novel written in English by Romanian author EO Chirovici is a sophisticated take, complete with framing devices and plenty of mind games, on a simple whodunit. The Book of Mirrors (Century, [pound]12.99) begins when New York literary agent Peter Katz receives an unfinished manuscript dealing with the events leading up to the unsolved murder, almost 30 years earlier, of Princeton psychology professor Joseph Wieder. When Katz learns that the author has died and the remainder of the text is nowhere to be found, he hires journalist John Keller to try and discover the truth. Keller, tiring of teasing out hard information from a tangle of contradictory accounts and clashing agendas, passes the baton back to Roy Freeman, the original detective on the case. Freeman, now retired and in the initial stages of Alzheimer's, nevertheless manages, with the aid of some surprising new information, to bring the story full circle. A study of manipulation and the protean character of memory, The Book of Mirrors is slow-burning but entirely compelling. Paula Daly's fourth novel, The Trophy Child (Bantam, [pound]12.99), deals with a psychological experiment of a different kind. Tiger mum Karen Bloom is determined that her daughter, 10-year-old Bronte, will excel in life. Tutoring the poor kid to the point of exhaustion, she ignores her stoner son, troubled teenage stepdaughter and husband, Noel, who has abdicated his parental responsibilities in favour of picking up women in bars. One of these is DS Joanne Aspinall, who is called in to investigate after Bronte goes missing. The child returns unhurt, but not before Karen has provoked public outrage with her ill-advised comments ("this is not some council estate case") to the press. When Karen is found murdered, not only does Aspinall find herself with a long list of suspects, but she also has to face the possibility that her attraction to Noel may be clouding her professional judgment. Not a particularly complex read, but a terrific page turner. Rennie Airth's fifth John Madden mystery, The Death of Kings (Mantle, [pound]18.99), begins in 1938 with the killing of actor Portia Blake during a smart house party in Kent. Eleven years later, retired chief inspector Angus Sinclair receives an anonymous letter and a jade pendant apparently worn by Blake on the day of her death, and begins to wonder if the wrong man was hanged for the crime. Scotland Yard are reluctant to reopen the case, and, laid up with gout, Sinclair persuades Madden, who has left the police force, to conduct an unofficial investigation. What he uncovers takes him from the upper echelons of society to the criminal underworld of the Chinese triads and back again. The pace may be slow, but Airth captures the postwar ethos well; solid storytelling, a cast of well-drawn characters and clever sleuthing from Madden make for a satisfyingly meaty read. Stav Sherez is one of the most distinctive and intelligent British crime writers, and his latest novel, The Intrusions (Faber, [pound]12.99), is well up to his usual high standard. The third in the Carrigan and Miller series sees the two detectives investigating the abduction and subsequent killing of Anna Becker, a young woman who came to London hoping for a place at Rada, but ended up living in a hostel at the seedier end of Bayswater and taking cleaning jobs to make ends meet. Carrigan and Miller discover that not only has someone been trolling Anna, but remote-access technology has been used to control her laptop, driving her to a nervous breakdown -- and it appears that she isn't the only one who has been targeted. A little more detail about the detectives' personal lives (Carrigan is still dealing with the fallout from an earlier case) would perhaps be helpful for newcomers to the series. But the main plot, with its online gaslighting, misogyny and obsession, is utterly riveting and truly terrifying. Highly recommended, with the caveat that you may never look at your computer in quite the same way again. Inspired by a real unsolved crime, Nicolas Obregon's debut novel, Blue Light Yokohama (Michael Joseph, [pound]12.99), is set in Tokyo, where Inspector Kosuke Iwata has just joined the homicide squad. His new colleagues are overtly hostile. He is given a case in which a Korean family of four has been murdered in their home, a black sun daubed on the ceiling and the smell of incense the only real clues. It seems to be a poisoned chalice, the original investigator having thrown himself off a bridge four days earlier. Iwata's troubled past has left him plagued by nightmares and his superiors are more hindrance than help as more "black sun" murders follow. With a labyrinthine plot and a likable protagonist, Blue Light Yokohama is a strong beginning to what promises to be an excellent series. - Laura Wilson.
Kirkus Review
Two ex-detectives' persistence throws new light on an old murder in postwar England.Eleven years after actress Portia Blake was murdered on a country estate, an anonymous letter and a flawed jade pendant make retired Chief Inspector Angus Sinclair wonder if the wrong man was hanged for the crime on his watch. Too laid up with gout to travel, he asks his former subordinate John Madden, also retired, to persuade Scotland Yard to reopen the case. But there's no proof that the jade pendant is the same one Portia was wearing the day she left Sir Jack Jessup's house, climbed up a hill, and was strangled with her own scarf. The ex-con who was arrested for her murder confessed, the police stopped following other leads, and the condemned man, even though he recanted, was executed. But Sinclair is so perturbed that Madden unofficially visits the crime scenes and interviews Portia's fellow houseguests from the day of the murder. Sir Richard Jessup, the son of Portia's original host, helpfully enlightens Madden about Stanley Wing, the Eurasian guest who brought Portia to the house party. Sir Jack had rescued Wing from the streets when he was a boy, raised him at his own expense, and made him his business partner in the Asian trade until Sir Richard had to throw him out for questionable practices. Wing's presence at the party was awkward enough, but Portia's provocative behavior seemed calculated to embarrass the men at dinner the night before her murder. A sensational news headline finally forces Scotland Yard to reopen the case, and a new anonymous letter with a series of photos clearly intended for blackmail moves the dogged investigation in a new direction. The fifth in Airth's series (The Reckoning, 2014, etc.) is an intelligent character study conducted at a crawl. The hero's fans will find him as thoughtful and principled as ever, but lovers of heart-pounding whodunits should look elsewhere. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
It's been 17 years since readers were introduced to Insp. John Madden in River of Darkness. At the time Madden was a returning World War I veteran whose experiences in the trenches and collaboration with Dr. Helen Blackwell convinced him to employ the as yet unproven science of psychological profiling to track down a serial killer. By 1949, the time frame for Airth's latest, Madden has happily retired to the life of a farmer, but he's called back into service to investigate a cold case on behalf of two former colleagues. Once again readers are treated to an insider's view of Madden's contemplative approach to his inquiries; this time he's delving into the social world of Britain's aristocracy in search of the true killer of would-be actress Portia Blake, who died on the Kent estate of Sir Jack Jessup 11 years earlier. VERDICT This volume will be warmly welcomed by series followers and can be recommended to fans of British procedurals and golden age mysteries alike.-Nancy McNicol, Hamden P.L., CT © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
