Shallow Grave: A Bill Slider Mystery (Scribner) (Inspector Bill Slider Mysteries)

If classical music always seems to be playing in the background of Cynthia Harrod-Eagles's intelligent and very funny books about Inspector Bill Slider, chalk it up to the fact that the London copper's live-in lady friend Joanna is a professional violinist, and many of their friends are musicians. That plus the barrage of literary puns and quips that Slider exchanges with his chief assistant, Atherton, gives the series a distinctly upscale aura.

This seventh installment begins in a setting of rare architectural beauty, an elegant old house on a private estate set amid the bustle of West London. The browbeaten daughter of a famous historian has started her day in a very unfortunate manner--by discovering a dead body in a trench about to be filled with cement. The body belongs to the wife of Eddie Andrews, the contractor scheduled to do the cementing. Naturally, Andrews becomes the chief suspect--especially when it turns out that he knew of his wife's ongoing infidelities. But this happens so early in the book that seasoned mystery readers will soon consider other suspects, including a flashy but shallow real estate agent and the crusty old historian.

Meanwhile, Slider deals with personal matters of equal weight: Atherton's shaky return to duty after having been seriously wounded, and the decision by Bill's own runaway wife to leave the man she ran off with. This could seriously affect his and girlfriend Joanna's plans for their own future. "He didn't go straight home," Harrod-Eagles writes after Slider visits his distraught wife. "He drove around a bit, not really aware of where he was going; just going, with that instinct to escape the emotional scene that throughout history had made men leave home, fleeing their mother's pain, their wife's, their children's, going to the Crusades, to war, to the Colonies, the Antarctic, the Moon, the pub...."

Other Slider books in paperback: Killing Time, Death to Go, and Grave Music. --Dick Adler