Chelsea Mansions
A Brock and Kolla Mystery by Barry Maitland
Review: The detective team of DCI David Brock and DI Kathy Kolla investigate the circumstances surrounding two murder victims found within days of each other — one who lived in the area, the other staying at a nearby hotel — in Chelsea Mansions, the eleventh mystery in this series by Barry Maitland.
The first is a 70-year-old American female tourist, who was witnessed by several people as a man threw her in front of a bus on a busy street as she and her companion left the annual Chelsea Flower Show. A few days later a wealthy Russian man was stabbed in his garden at night while enjoying a Cuban cigar. At first there is nothing obvious to connect the two victims to each other, but — call it police instinct — the crimes are too well planned and executed that Brock and Kolla know there must be something. Before they can do much more, though, Brock falls ill and is hospitalized. Kolla can't seem to do anything right in their Superintendent's eyes, and is quickly sidelined, a new team assigned to the case. Though Kolla is warned to stay away from the investigation, she flies to Boston, the home of the murdered woman, to see if she can pin down the connection between the victims, where secrets from the past are brought to light.
Chelsea Mansions is an outstanding entry in this series. The characters, both the "good guys" and the "bad guys" deserve mention, as the strengths of the latter bring out the best in the former. The settings are vividly described and the interwoven plotlines — though rather complicated and at times tricky to follow — create a suspenseful atmosphere for the investigation. Highly recommended.
Special thanks to guest reviewer Betty of The Betz Review for contributing her review of Chelsea Mansions.
Acknowledgment: Minotaur Books provided a copy of Chelsea Mansions for this review.
Review Copyright © 2011 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved
Selected reviews of other mysteries by this author …
All My Enemies
Minotaur Books (Trade Paperback), September 2009
ISBN-13: 9780312384005; ISBN-10: 0312384009
Location(s) referenced in Chelsea Mansions: London, England
— ◊ —
Chelsea Mansions by Barry Maitland
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Format: Hardcover
ISBN-10: 0-312-60066-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-60066-2
Publication Date: October 2011
List Price: $25.99
Synopsis (from the publisher): The annual Chelsea Flower Show is one of the tourist highlights of London. But this year, the event is tainted by the murder of an American tourist in a random act of violence. But when DCI David Brock's Serious Crime division of Scotland Yard investigates, they quickly discover that the killer somehow avoided having both his face and his escape captured on any of the many closed circuit cameras in the area. The conclusion is inescapable — what seemed a senseless, but random, event was in fact a carefully planned murder.
But how could the victim — a retired widow traveling with a long time family friend — be worth the trouble and expense of such an elaborate killing? When a very wealthy Russian oligarch is killed in the garden of his palatial estate not far from the hotel where the murdered tourist was staying, Brock and Kolla suspect that something more complicated is going on and that the two killings are somehow related. In a case that takes Brock and his team all the way to the States and back, secrets from a long forgotten past are the key to a string of bloody murders that are just beginning …