The Godwin Sideboard

Think antiques, and conjure up blue-chip Chippendales, Hepplewhites, Sheratons or Phyfes in brilliant museum settings. Glowing images of elegance and taste. Think again, and you have the subfusc nasty world of thugs and killers skulking about in John Malcolm's new English mystery novel. Here, once more, we have the dark underside of interior decoration. Malcolm's hero, Tim Simpson (first glimpsed in "A Back Room in Somers Town"), is an expert in art and antiques. Though an amateur in sleuthing--like Marple and Wimsey and those other meddlers of English fiction--this ruggedly attractive cove can take a beating better than most. But it is in dishing it out that he excels. A former star rugby player, he sends the villains packing with "hooks" and "hands offs" and employs his high punt kick where it will do the most good. Employed by a major London brokerage firm, Simpson is director of its Art Investment Fund. His boss, Jeremy White, suggests that they invest in furniture and, almost casually, Simpson comes up with the "fateful idea" of a Godwin sideboard. W. E. Godwin, he explains, was an architect and designer, and his 1867 "black buffet" was an early milestone on the road to Modernism. Los Angeles Times Review