River Deep by
Priscilla Masters
hbk out February 03
Published by Allison Busby
at £17.99
The elegant old Shropshire town of Shrewsbury has featured in crime fiction before.
Ellis Peters made admirable and repeated use of Shrewsbury's setting close to the
border between England and Wales for her Cadfael mysteries, but Priscilla Masters is,
so far as I know, the first of the current generation of crime writers to follow Peters'
lead. She does so with a novel featuring a brand new character, Martha Gunn, a
youngish widow and mother of twins who is the local coroner. At the start of the
book, the town is suffering from one of those floods to which it is susceptible and a
body floats before the very eyes of a young constable who is checking on one of the
flooded houses in Marine Terrace. The deceased had been stabbed, but there is
prolonged confusion about his identity. The plot thickens as a second murder occurs
and the coroner starts to receive menacing 'Messages for Martha' which nevertheless
fail to deter her from determined amateur sleuthing. The office of coroner presents a
would-be detective with both privileges and disadvantages but Martha is as
resourceful as she is unorthodox and eventually she uncovers an elaborate scheme
reminiscent of a Hitchcock movie classic. This is a very readable mystery with a
distinctive backdrop and one looks forward to Martha's further investigations.
(
Martin Edwards
- author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries)
River Deep by
Priscilla Masters
