Death in Disguise

June 22, 2015
The Whitebridge Players resurrect themselves for a revival of Thomas Kyd’s play The Spanish Tragedy—20 years after their last performance and the closing of the local theater—in Spencer’s dark ninth Monica Paniatowski mystery (after 2014’s Supping with the Devil). One of the troupe’s members, Mark Cotton, is now a highly paid TV actor, playing a detective chief inspector of all things, while a second, Sarah Audley, is poised to do the same and wants to model her character after Monika. When one of the leads is murdered on opening night, there’s no shortage of suspects and a demand from the powers-that-be to solve the case quickly. Despite her own reservations and those of her colleagues, Monika is determined to see the case through to the bitter end as egos, lust, betrayals (old and new), and hidden motives abound. Spencer hits the mark once again with a murky, engaging plot and a cadre of quirky, troubled characters.

June 1, 2016
When a woman's body is found in the most expensive suite at Whitebridge's ritzy Royal Victoria Hotel, the case falls to DCI Monika Paniatowski and her team. There's no identification on the woman or in her room, but the hotel manager says she registered as Mary Edwards and paid cash up front. This slightly unusual fact, combined with the discovery that the clothes in her closet were two distinctly different typessome cheap, some very expensiveleads Monika to conclude that the woman wanted to disguise herself and perhaps hide the real reason she was in Whitebridge. Eventually, Monika's sidekick, Jack Crane, digs out the clue that finally unlocks the puzzle when he discovers that the victim had visited the Whitebridge library to research a decades-old murder case. As the clues finally start to make sense, a tragic story is revealed, and the victim is finally avenged in a most unexpected way. A gripping plot, twists aplenty, good pacing, and the tough yet vulnerable Monika make this an engrossing read in Spencer's British procedural series set in the 1970s.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

June 1, 2016
It takes more than a village to solve a murder when an American visitor is killed in her suite at Whitebridge's posh Royal Victoria.Just as DCI Monika Paniatowski's life with her twins seems to be settling into routine, Acting Chief Constable Keith Pickering pulls her off leave to deal with a sensitive case. Pickering is an evenhanded boss, but he wants his best detective (Thicker Than Water, 2015, etc.) to investigate the death of Mary Edwards, who booked the Prince Albert Suite at Whitebridge's best hotel. The reason for the dead woman's visit seems murky at best. Mary, whose passport has unaccountably gone missing, seems to have had two personae: a fashionable blonde New Yorker and a toned-down researcher in a frumpy brown wig. Monika's appeal to the public yields fruit on both sides of the Atlantic. Lepidopterist Walter Spinks IDs the butterfly tattooed on Mary's wrist as native to Lancashire. Librarian Janet Dobson spots mousey Mary as the patron doing microfiche research. Solicitor Arthur Tyndale reveals that Mary retained him the week before her death. Perhaps most significantly, New York police detective Fred Mahoney is able to give Monika a clue to Mary's real identity. But why would Melissa Evans, celebrated author of tell-all memoirs, tattoo an image of a northern brown argus on her wrist, take herself off to Whitebridge to look at newspaper clippings from 1924, and consult a local attorney about gun laws and safe houses? That's the question Monika and her crew are left to answer.Even a routine procedural isn't quite so routine in Spencer's deft hands.

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June 27, 2016
In British author Spencer’s well-crafted 11th mystery featuring Det. Chief Insp. Monika Paniatowski (after Thicker Than Water), the discovery of American Mary Edwards’s dead body on Mar. 13, 1978, in Whitebridge’s best hotel, the Royal Victoria, prompts Acting Chief Constable Keith Pickering to call on his best, Monika, to lead the investigation. Monika and her team, including Det. Sgt. Kate Meadows and Det. Insp. Colin Beresford, question hotel staff and guests and track Mary’s movements. They learn that Mary was in disguise, that Mary wasn’t her real name, that she had handled a pub bully with a swift kick, that she was doing research at the local library into something that happened in 1924, and had consulted a local solicitor. It’s clear from the start that there’s a connection with the 1924 murder of Mill owner Wilfred Hardcastle, but ferreting out Mary’s real identity and purpose and how that long ago murder led to hers makes for a successful puzzle.