Loser's Blues

Most of the way through, I would have given this 4 or 5 stars --its hero is pianist trying to decide whether to stay with a commercially fairly successful jazz career or return to classical music, whose ex-girlfriend is murdered; her rich elderly fiancée believes the hero did it and is setting thugs on him, so he breaks into the fiancée's house and finds out he is routemaster for a large smuggling firm --when the routemaster returns unexpectedly the hero, accidentally high on cocaine dust, first fights his way out and then goes on a wild car ride through the outskirts of London pursued by one of the routemaster's henchmen. The hero had apparently made a satisfying deduction of the real murderer --one I had made myself earlier -- and show more if that had been the ending I would have been very happy, but instead there is a twist ending in which the killer turns out to be someone else. This is the second British mystery of the period I have read lately with that kind of ending, and I find it very frustrating. I may say there is also a rather nice police detective involved but he doesn't really do much of anything, aside from deciding that the hero was not guilty despite the claims of the routemaster early on. The hero also becomes involved with a nice if plump woman. show less