A Late Phoenix

Read three of these in a row. Like most Catherine Airds, good but I can't distinguish one from the next. They're all C.D. Sloane stories, and I can very rarely remember which title goes with which story. But they're always worth reading and re-reading - I just got these three but none of them are new to me, I enjoyed reading them and will keep them for future rereadings. English small-town police procedurals; she has some repeated themes (the Superintendent is a pointy-haired boss; the constable Sloane always gets stuck with is a speed demon with no brain; "Happy Harry of the Traffic Division - he had that name because he had never been known to smile. Harry always insisted that there was nothing in the Traffic Division's work worth a show more smile..." - that line, almost verbatim, is in every single book. But the mysteries are nicely varied, and oddly enough while the recurring characters are mostly cardboard and cliche, the ones involved in any individual mystery - the non-recurring characters - are nicely rounded and interesting. show less

The motive meant everything in this one. The plotting was not so much intricate as detailed. The writing was rather good, and I laughed aloud at some discussions of the bombing during the war.

The reading was excellent, with a bunch of snotty, drawling British accents. The doctor's secretary was by far the most amusing. The man with the bronchitis, got from being gassed during WWI, coughed and weezed horrifically.

Mystery writers often had a lot of trouble with contemporary color, in this case flower-power hippies. The diatribes by Sloan's superior are just nutty, but Sloan's ruminations are also an artifact of their time.

I have to say that I liked this more the second time around, which was 2024, even though I realized that in the end, I show more didn't know why the corpse was buried where it was in the first place or indeed when or how the victim was shot. show less

Luckily A Late Phoenix by Catherine Aird was a very short mystery as I found it a bit of a slog. Set in the late 1960s, a construction crew unearths a skeleton in what would have been the basement of a bombed out house that was finally being cleared for redevelopment. It would have been dismissed as a victim of Nazi bombing but lodged in the spine was a bullet.

The skeleton turned out to be a female and she had been pregnant when she had been killed. DI Sloan, assisted by the not very bright Sergeant Crosby are assigned the case and start to make inquiries. The house where the body was found had two sons that were in their twenties at the time, so their investigation started there. As the pieces slowly start to fit together, one of the show more key witnesses is murdered and evidence of even more foul play turns up. Someone is racing ahead of the police and getting rid anyone who could point their finger at him. Sloan persists and eventually figures out who the murderer is.

Although the story, the setting and the timing all intrigued me, the execution was pretty hum-drum. The characters were flat and I constantly forgot who was who, the comic relief wasn’t very funny and the ending was rather dull. I have enjoyed this authors books in the past, but A Late Phoenix is one that I could have easily skipped. show less

I have been reading the Inspector Sloan books by Catherine Aird on and off for the past few years. I cannot say I dislike them. However, there are certain portions in all of these books that seem superfluous. At times, characters talk on and on about things that have nothing to do with anything. I guess, there was a word limit that Aird had to reach in order for the book to be publishable. This is more apparent in A Late Phoenix than the previous books. The plot began promisingly. I love books dealing with cold cases. However, the frequency with which the narrative went off the rails put me off. Promising premise, wish it had been better written.

The people who lived in the houses that were bombed on the site claimed not to know whose body it might have been. No-one knows of a young woman who might have been unaccounted for. But Inspector Sloan sees a flicker of recognition in the eyes of one of the men. And someone is taking desperate measures to stop the truth from being uncovered.

Catherine Aird specialises in tangled plots, many red herrings, and this novel is no exception.

By the end, the place is littered with bodies including a death previously thought to be a suicide.

In this, the 4th installment in Aird's series featuring CD Sloan, the main character is summoned to the scene of an archaeological dig that is taking place prior to the development of new construction. It seems that a body has been found, and the local doctor decides that it's not the remains of a Saxon (as hoped for by the archaeologists) but rather a young woman dead 30 years or so. The developers are hoping they can get back to their project, but it is not to be -- the autopsy on the body shows that it was murder. But whose murder was it? And did it or did it not have anything to do with another murder that occurs shortly after the body is found?

Good, not as good as #2 but still okay in the police procedural realm. Light reading; show more recommended for those who like British series mysteries. show less

i sort of lost track of this one in the middle. so i don't really know who the murderer is. i can tell you the name but i have no idea who this person is.