The Cherry Pickers by
Betty Rowlands
pbk out July 98
(NEL)
at £5.99
The body of a young gypsy girl is found in a discarded freezer which has been stolen from outside the house of a prominent resident of the Cotswold village of Upper Benbury, Major Dudley Ford, a typical peppery ex soldier. Melissa Craig, the crime writer, who lives near the Fords, becomes interested in the murder, to the dismay of her man friend, ex-DCI Ken Harris, who urges her to keep her distance and to leave the matter to the police. But Melissa persists, with help from Bruce Ingham, a thrusting journalist who had once been a police officer. Together they visit the nearby gypsy camp and Melissa befriends Rachel who, she finds, is the aunt of the dead girl. It appears that the girl wanted to see the country, Hungary, where her people came from and left the camp. Melissa wonders whether she might have linked up with a lorry driver who went on frequent trips to Europe.
Who is this driver? Is he the murderer? Melissa suspects not and manages to track him down in a sequence that is not entirely plausible, though it is just possible, given the claustrophobic environment of a village. Her aim is to warn him of likely danger from the gypsies, who are almost certain to mete out their own code of justice. But the man responds by attacking Melissa and takes off in his BMW. He is not, of course, the murderer: chief suspects in such cases rarely are. The real murderer, when eventually unmasked at the end, comes as not entirely a surprise.
This is rightly described as a Melissa Craig Mystery and is set in Betty Rowlands' familiar Cotswolds. The police have a role to play, inevitably, but in the person of DCI Holloway are largely ineffectual. The focus is on Melissa, on her detection skills and on her relationship with Ken Harris, which is not entirely happy. As we read on we realise that she is coming close to the murderer and that she is not going to submit to the possessive and overbearing Harris. Melissa is too much her own woman. It is all very neatly and convincingly done and a worthy successor to the previous six Melissa Craig mysteries.
The Cherry Pickers by
Betty Rowlands