A Timely Death: A Francesca Wilson Mystery

Plumbing the troubled waters of the relations between men and women in her fifth Francesca Wilson story (after Death Among the Dons), Neel delivers a clear-eyed view of both domestic conflict, which hovers over Francesca's marriage, and domestic violence, which haunts the crime she solves. Volunteering at a women's shelter during an outbreak of measles, Francesca is grateful for the medical training of the most recent client, Annabelle Brewster, who has fled her violent lover, Dr. Antony Price. Matthew Sutherland, the shelter's lawyer, is anxious to take Annabelle's case-but he can't when he learns that his firm represented Antony's stepmother in a similar case of domestic violence against her husband (Antony's father), William. Francesca's husband, John McLeish, now Detective Chief Superintendent at New Scotland Yard, bumps into the Price family from another angle: his ex-lover, also a copper, is investigating fraud at William Price's time-share vacation business. When William Price is found hanging in his kitchen and money is missing from the safe, the police focus on two suspects: Price's second son, a drug addict, and an MP who wanted 20,000 the dead man had been holding for him. Neel covers a spectrum of intimate relations-battered women returning to their lovers; happily married people teetering on the edge of infidelity; lovers driven to extreme actions by obsession, libido or deviousness-with admirable nuance, carving psychological texture into this skillfully plotted mystery. (Jan.)