Star Fall

Cynthia Harrod-Eagles has a solid formula and she doesn’t deviate much from it – someone (often famous) gets bumped off in West London, and a good-humoured bunch of plods with a nice line in snappy dialogue investigate.

Rowland Egerton is a popular antiques expert much beloved of TV audiences. He’s found dead in his flat by his business partner and close friend John Lavender (an immediate suspect if ever there was one) – and a Faberge box and a valuable painting are missing. But DI Bill Slider, his bagman DS Jim Atherton and the rest of the team soon discover that he wasn’t quite as nice a chap as his on-screen persona would have you believe.

If you’re a regular fan of Harrod-Eagles, it’s very much business as usual, as Slider’s team, none of whom are short of a bon mot or two, wisecrack their way around London interviewing a distinctly picaresque list of suspects.

But there’s a darker feel to Slider’s private life – he’s worried about partner Joanna, who has recently had a miscarriage. And the tangled web that is the enigmatic Atherton’s love life continues.

Harrod-Eagles’ world is an odd one – we rarely see black or Asian characters, which is weird considering this is London. And there are some strange pronouncements – according to Slider, quite seriously, real men never drink lattes. And really, not all gay men are interior designers or ballet dancers. Yawn …

But if this doesn’t bother you (or if it vaguely irritates you, as it does me, but you let it pass once you’ve rolled your eyes a few times), any addition to this long-running series is always a treat. The plots tend to be serviceable, but the real sell is the police team, including a couple of very feisty women cops who take no crap from the lads. It’s a novelty to find a group of colleagues who take the piss out of each other, but who genuinely get on and are pulling in the same direction.

And you’ve got to like an author who takes such a clear joy in playing with language. Atherton is king of the puns, and I’m very fond of long-suffering Supt Porson who never met a sentence he couldn’t mangle.

Star Fall is the 17th book in the Slider series. It seems as fresh as book one, simply because Harrod-Eagles has a light hand with her writing, strikes a sensible balance between Slider’s professional and personal life, and because she has a cast of leading characters who’d be an absolute riot if you met them in the pub and who’d be there in a heart-beat if you needed them.