Funeral Music by
Morag Joss
pbk out July 99
(NEL)
at £5.99
Sara Selkirk, attractive and in her early twenties, is a cellist of international repute who has suffered a breakdown after the death of her lover. The chance to regain her lost confidence and resume her career comes when she is asked to perform again in public at a charity concert in the Pump Room in Bath, The concert's organiser Is Matthew Sawyer, the Director of Museums. He is disliked by many and considered arrogant. After the concert Sera discovers his body floating in the Sacred Spring overflow of the Roman Baths. He had been stabbed and dumped in the water.
The detective In charge of the case is DCI Andrew Poole. He is a music lover and a cellist and has been having lessons with Sera. He is unhappily married and his Wife is becoming jealous of Sara. He finds the Sawyer case difficult at first: "unexciting, filled with dogged repetitive routine and, so far anyway, yielding nothing". He refuses to discuss it with Sara, but her knowledge of the people concerned makes him relent and he comes to welcome her help and insights. It is she who eventually discovers the identity of the murderer. In so doing she puts herself in danger, not so much for her life as for her career, when a distraught woman with a knife threatens to cut her wrist.
The murderer is brought to book eventually, though Andrew's behaviour displeases Sera and she rejects his advances when he tells her he loves her and has left his wife. If there is a second Sara Selkirk case it will be interesting to see whether DCI Poole is involved. Sara is a very appealing character and rather overshadows Poole, but some of the minor characters,
particularly Derek and Cecily, have no vital parts to play and are not even suspects. The writing, too, sometimes strains for effect: "Deep inside him his annoyance, thick, hairy and foul-smelling, yawned, got up, stretched, turned round and lay back down like a dog before a roaring fire". But this
is, nevertheless, a promising first novel. The author writes well and has a keen sense of place. Her evocation of Bath is very convincing.
Funeral Music by
Morag Joss