DCI Kathy Kolla is a team leader in Scotland Yard’s homicide unit and DCI David Brock is a supernumerary in the fraud squad. He’s unhappy; too much time is spent in front of computers and little or no time interviewing suspects.
An opportunity arises to get away from the office. Brock is sent to assess a worrying email received from Russia by Nadya Babington, a relative of an assistant commissioner. The chief inspector is to convince Nadya not to transfer money to a bitcoin account. She’s the Russian wife of a wealthy collector of contemporary art. Brock urges her to ignore the email. Three days later, Nadya’s body is recovered from a pond on the Hoo Peninsula, not far from London.
Over at Homicide, Kathy Kolla is called to a suspected suicide behind a door secured by a sliding bolt that cannot be opened from the outside. The only window is locked from the inside. Kolla queries the verdict: there’s no note; the dead man had given no indication of being depressed or contemplating suicide; the blood spatter pattern is consistent with someone else being in the room; and, finally, the dead man’s throat was cut from left to right, as a right-handed person would do.
He was left-handed.
The latest ‘Brock and Kolla’, The Russian Wife, is well paced with characters that intrigue. There’s also an enlightening introduction to the hazards experienced if your hobby is collecting contemporary art.
Reviewed by Clive Hodges
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
My family came from Paisley, an industrial city near Glasgow in Scotland, where I was born. When I was young we moved to London, where I went to a school with an English teacher who inspired me about literature. But I wanted to be an architect, which I studied at Cambridge University. After a period in practice I studied urban design at the University of Sheffield, where I also taught.
In 1984 I was offered the position of head of the architecture school at the University of Newcastle in Australia, and moved there with my family. Six years later Newcastle was struck by an earthquake, and Margaret, my wife, was almost killed when the house fell in. It was a dramatic and chaotic time, and as a reaction to what was going on around us I began to think about the plot of a murder mystery, The Marx Sisters. This was published in 1994, and became the first of a series of twelve Brock and Kolla novels published over the next 20 years, together with one stand-alone mystery thriller Bright Air, set in Australia.
In 2000 I retired from the University of Newcastle in order to write full time, and my latest project is a full-blooded Australian set of novels, the Belltree Trilogy. I live and write in a small town in the Hunter Valley, an attractive wine-growing and agricultural area in New South Wales on the Pacific Coast of Australia, which coexists with one of the largest coal ports in the world, in the harbour of Newcastle, which is where the second Belltree novel is set.
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