Life Blood: A Novel of Supense

This new work by Llewellyn ( The Masks of Rome ) is a dark novel set firmly in the English tradition of popular suspense fiction. The elements are all in place: a deceptively quaint Cotswolds village, Shipcote, where the skeletons of history rattle their discontented bones; Jo Treleven, a young mother and author who is widowed but, fortunately, not helpless; her Cotswolds cottage, a piece of property for which various characters heatedly devise various agendas; and the tale of a book-within-the-book that leads to literary vandalism and murder. Several suspect outsiders intrude from the other side of the Atlantic, and the details of intertwined lives in Shipcote provide enough interest to advance the plot. However, the story is weakened by too hasty a telling, and Llewellyn also shows a tendency toward heavy-handedness in the romance department. Still, as in the drawings described by her protagonist, an illustrator and a writer of children's books, profuse and carefully rendered detail fills and enriches Llewellyn's Cotswolds setting. Despite some lapses into sentimentality, the novel exerts a certain charm. (Oct.)