Chelsea Mansions
A Brock and Kolla Mystery
-
-
4.3 • 7 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
"Brock and Kolla's meticulous, psychologically astute sleuthing fascinates." --Entertainment Weekly on No Trace
The annual Chelsea Flower Show is one of the tourist highlights of London. But this year, the event is tainted by the murder of an American tourist in a random act of violence. But when DCI David Brock's Serious Crime division of Scotland Yard investigates, they quickly discover that the killer somehow avoided having both his face and his escape captured on any of the many closed circuit cameras in the area. The conclusion is inescapable - what seemed a senseless, but random, event was in fact a carefully planned murder.
But how could the victim- a retired widow traveling with a long time family friend - be worth the trouble and expense of such an elaborate killing? When a very wealthy Russian oligarch is killed in the garden of his palatial estate not far from the hotel where the murdered tourist was staying, Brock and Kolla suspect that something more complicated is going on and that the two killings are somehow related. In a case that takes Brock and his team all the way to the States and back, secrets from a long forgotten past are the key to a string of bloody murders that are just beginning...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Near the outset of Maitland's overwrought 11th mystery featuring Det. Chief Insp. David Brock and Det. Insp. Kathy Kolla (after 2009's The Dark Mirror), an unknown but exceptionally strong assailant throws 70-year-old American widow Nancy Haynes, who spent the day at London's annual Chelsea Flower Show, to her death in front of a bus. What at first appears to be a random act of violence by a disturbed man turns out to be a carefully premeditated killing in which the accomplices are afraid to talk. Soon after, someone stabs to death a wealthy Russian oligarch in a garden near the Chelsea hotel where Haynes was staying. Brock and Kolla pursue both cases, which predictably intersect. Maitland throws in academics with arcane knowledge, glamorous model wives, armchair detectives, cold war ghosts, corrupt politicians, financial wizards, illegal immigrants, and much more, but the result is more wearying than stimulating.
