One of the best plotted crime fiction novels in the genre’s history and worthy of being published in this British Library Crime Classic edition. In craft the first chapter stands on a par with Tony Hillerman’s first chapter of Skinwalkers, both in itself as a structural device providing an inspired introduction to the dramatis personae and as the fulcrum on which the plot balances.

He could not know that, just a year later, one of the writers would die, self-confessed a murderer.

England, 1940, Heron’s Point, a military hospital that all too often does double duty for civilians caught by bombs during the Blitz. Brand brings the home front of the early years of that war into acute and painful focus.

“You women are all arrant cowards,” said Cockie contemptuously.
Woods looked about her at the bomb-scarred landscape and the blast-pitted buildings wehere she and a hundred other women were voluntarily spending the days of their service to their country; at the fields, pitted with craters, at the gaunt white limbs of the trees broken down by a bomb the night before; at the ruins of the NAAFI where a girl called Groves, whom she had hardly known, had been killed by falling masonry; at the patches of dry grass all round her, blackened and scorched by innumerable incendiary bombs; at the jagged fragments of bomb-casing littering the ground at her feet.

One of those civilians dies in the operating theater, it appears first as one of those unlucky happenstances that occur during surgery. But no, it’s murder, and then if there was any doubt it is quickly followed by a second murder, and then by an attempted third and fourth. Chain-smoking Inspector Cockrill is at first annoyed at being sent on a wild-goose chase until the death proves murder after all and one worth his time.

…he sent for the Matron and the Commanding Officer and talked to them at length–neither of them had felt so young for years.

Cockrill quickly divines whodunnit and how but not why, and to complicate matters he doesn’t have any proof. So he desperately needs the killer’s confession, which leads to all the suspects being corralled together over an agonizing three-day period, ratcheting up tension among the characters as well as in the reader. Whew. The characters are great, too, each and every one of them behaving exactly as they were written (not always the case in crime novels, where authors sometimes bend their characters into pretzels to serve their plots, but I digress) right up to the end, when together, they see mercy done, if not justice according to Cockrill.

“You’ve deliberately connived at [their] death. You’ve assisted a murderer in evading justice. For all I know you contributed to [their] death. I can see it now–you’ve been playing for time. All of yu. Every time I tried to speak to [them], every time [they] showed signs of collapse…one of you drew my attention away…

But there is even another twist to the tale after that. Excellent prose style, too, with lots of British snark, and I didn’t know whodunnit until the end and almost didn’t believe it when the murderer’s identity was revealed. But Brand draws all the threads together and makes the plot make perfect sense. A thoroughly enjoyable and very satisfactory read.

Book Review Monday Chatter Christianna Brand Green for Danger