Kerry Hood was in publishing for many years, working in publicity for several publishers over the time, working on fiction and non-fiction titles. Crime and thrillers have always been those she turns to first, however, and the ones she reads late at night or when she has a quiet moment.
This is the sixth in the DCI Frank Merlin series by Mark Ellis, and the best yet. Ellis is one of a small band of crime novelists who focus on London during World War 2, and whilst the war makes that period hectic in its own way, it is a pleasure to drop back a notch or two in terms of speed of life. Whistles, not smart phones, were the order of the day. Bullets, however, stopped a person just as dead.
The Officer in the title refers to a US Naval officer, killed somewhere in London and then dumped in Limehouse. Merlin and his team have just taken on a first murder – that of a Wimpole Street consultant, done to death in a violent and messy way in his Kensington flat – when this second murder investigation lands on his desk. Merlin’s small team, already groaning from the case load, must sort out both killings before they are stood down by a new boss, who has his own reasons for bringing in another team to take over. The race is on. However, first of all, they must unearth some leads, and these seem to be few and far between.
Running the two cases in parallel, there seem to be surprising connections, but how likely is it that a well-to-do Indian gynaecologist and an American Major are linked in some way? Coincidences are the very devil, and Merlin has no trust in them – but a whiff of blackmail seems as good a place to start as any …
Quite how Ellis stays in control of the twists and turns, manages his cast of characters (that run from Royal cousins to East End gangsters), and unravels the knots and tangles of the plot are nothing short of miraculous, but do it he does, as well as giving us war-torn London in 1943 and politics and policies that affect Britain across the world. From Japan to India, via America and Ireland, skulduggery leaves its cobweb threads of scheming and violence across this novel.
It was also a time of convention and moral conservatism, and some clubs, and their all-night clubbing, were forced underground; it took dogged research and fearless legwork from Merlin’s team to make headway. Not least knowing that some of the people under investigation had connections high up, and that the revelations being arrived at might even mark the end of DCI Merlin, made them stop.
Let’s hope that Merlin is, indeed, a long way from retiring …
