Wings Over the Watcher by
Priscilla Masters
pbk out August 06
(Allison Busby)
at £6.99
As a practising nurse and with a GP husband, Priscilla Masters often has a
medical content in her novels and this one is no exception, though being one
her Detective-Inspector Joanna Piercy series, it is primarily a police
procedural story. A very good 'whodunnit', it obeys the crime writer's
convention of having at least three, but not more than half a dozen suspects
and keeps the cat in the bag until the very end.
Sited in Leek, a Staffordshire town on the edge of the Peak District, the plot
revolves around the disappearance of Beatrice Pennington, a rather plain,
middle-aged librarian, who one day cycles to work, then vanishes. Her even
duller husband endlessly pesters the police, especially Joanna, to find her,
even though there is evidence that she has taken off with a secret lover.
The DI has personal problems of her own, her pathologist man-friend having
taken off for America for three months, leaving her with the problem of
telling him that the pregnancy he had provided has miscarried.
Then Beatrice's strangled body is found dumped in a hedge, but what now
has escalated from a missing person enquiry to a murder hunt is no further
forward. Two of the victim's women friends are holding something back and
Joanna's discovery that the toy-boy of one of them had made advances to
Beatrice opens up new possibilities. Fairly late in the saga, her female GP
also comes into the frame and the plot works itself up into a satisfactory
dénouement.
Priscilla Masters is an extremely good writer, with a gift for both
characterisation and a believable plot. She understands what makes people
tick, for better or worse, and is able to translate this into clear, crisp prose.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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Wings Over the Watcher by
Priscilla Masters
