REVIEW
CYNTHIA HARROD-EAGLES - BLOOD LINES
Warner - £4.99
This is the fifth novel featuring Detective Inspector Bill Slider and his colleagues at the Shepherd's Bush nick. Slider is not a happy man, largely because his violinist lover Joanna is away rehearsing at Glyndebourne. He has less time to mope after a body is found in a lavatory at the BBC TV Centre at White City: Roger Greatrex, a loathsome cultural pundit who pursued a secondary career as a philanderer, has apparently cut his throat.
Needless to say, it's not as simple as that: a fellow critic, due to appear on the same TV chat show as Greatrex, had good reason to kill him. Two members of the programme's production team are telling lies, and they too have motives for murder. Then, another suspect emerges - one of Slider's colleagues, and a friend as well. Slider follows the investigation through a tangle of twisting possibilities,violent deaths and conflicting evidence until at last he finds the sad, mad and not entirely plausible truth - and with it an unexpected connection to Joanna.
The book opens slowly. It has a large cast of characters, too many adverbs and tendency to bludgeon the reader with coppers' argot. But things improve enormously once the story gets going. Blood Lines is an intelligent police procedural which generates real suspense. Slider is emerging as a strong, sympathetic character who gains in stature with each book. Harrod-Eagles is excellent on London and on the private lives of her characters; she observes with precision and is convincing about the little tragedies and secrets that fill the lives of so many people.

CYNTHIA HARROD-EAGLES - KILLING TIME
Little Brown - £16.99
Another dose of mayhem descends on Shepherd's Bush in the sixth Bill Slider mystery. Detective Inspector Slider's friend and colleague, the dashing Sergeant Atherton, is still nursing life-threatening wounds received at the end of the last book. Slider himself is not in the best of health for the same reason. His hopes of a quiet week are dashed by the bloody murder of Jay Paloma - a male prostitute and erotic dancer with an uncanny resemblance to Princess Di. Slider and his team delve deeper and deeper into a sinister sub-culture where whores consort with cabinet ministers at a club where the shagging of a papier-mache sheep is part of the evening's entertainment; where beat policemen are slugged on the head and left for dead; and where black-cab taxi drivers are the only trustworthy people in sight.
The result is a lively book set in a convincing version of modern London. Harrod-Eagles has a penchant for punning chapter headings which may not be to everybody's taste; and her copy editor really should be firmer with her prose. On the other hand, she writes with enjoyable gusto - one policewoman is "living proof that Barbie and Ken had sex" - and she handles both her plot and her theme with great skill.
Killing Time is a book which has much to say about the problems of modern policing and about jealousy. Readable and entertaining, it has an underlying seriousness of purpose which lifts it out of the ordinary.
(Andrew Taylor)