Dying Fall

At the start of Harrod-Eagles’s solid 23rd mystery featuring London Det. Chief Insp. Bill Slider (after 2020’s Cruel as the Grave), Slider and longtime sidekick Det. Sgt. Jim Atherton are dispatched to a home after an anonymous caller reported spotting a body inside at the foot of a staircase. The shoes of the deceased, a 30-something woman, are on different steps, suggesting an accidental trip on a hole in the carpet at the top. But the massive head wound suggests that a murderer staged the scene. After the victim’s identified as Prue Chadacre, a secretary at the Historic Buildings National Drawings Archive, the plot thickens, as Slider and Atherton learn that Chadacre changed her birth name—and that the place she died was the site of another supposedly fatal accident decades earlier. Slider, who never met a pun he didn’t like (he complains that he’d expected the film Dunkirk “was going to be William Shatner’s autobiography”), and who’s a devoted family man, is a refreshing alternative to the dour leads of many police procedurals. Fans of Catherine Aird’s witty Inspector C.D. Sloan books will be hooked. (Feb.)