April 28, 2014
It’s not easy for a pretty young woman to get past both the entrenched sexism of the early 1960s and the hidebound British newspaper industry, as shown in Hall’s action-filled fourth mystery featuring photographer Kate O’Donnell (after 2013’s Dressed to Kill). Kate gets a freelance gig working with Carter Price, a national crime reporter who has heard rumors of a major heist being planned. Meanwhile, Kate’s sometime boyfriend, Det. Sgt. Harry Barnard, looks into a case involving a mutilated body found on a construction site in London’s West End. Harry is also under scrutiny because of his association with Ray Robertson, a childhood pal turned gangster. The plucky Kate won’t quit even when things get dangerous. The tension builds as the different plot lines come together, but Hall never loses control over the varying threads. She also does a terrific job of explaining the inner working of the press at a time when newspapers still mattered.
June 1, 2014
The year is 1963, and London's West End is rebuilding dramatically. Gutsy photographer Kate O'Donnell is working with a newspaper crime reporter in her fourth entry (after Dressed To Kill), making her especially vulnerable to gangster violence in the area.
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
November 15, 2018
London, 1964. A young woman dies in a fall from a high window. Murder or tragic accident? That's what Detective Sergeant Harry Barnard needs to determine. Meanwhile, photographer Kate O'Donnell, Harry's love interest, is concerned that one of her friends has vanished without a trace. Can Kate and Harry navigate the world of the swinging sixties and solve these mysteries? The seventh installment in the O'Donnell series blends plot and milieu into a satisfying mixture: come for the story, stay for the precisely detailed environment and its people. The author is perhaps better known for her Ackroyd-and-Thackeray crime novels, but this newer series is a keeper, too.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)
October 8, 2018
It’s 1964, and London is swinging, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the city’s Soho neighborhood, as shown in Hall’s solid seventh mystery featuring professional photographer Kate O’Donnell and her lover, Det. Sgt. Harry Barnard (after 2017’s Cover Up). Early one morning, Barnard answers a summons to Greek Street, where the body of a 15-year-old girl known only as Jackie has fallen from a window of the Late Supper Club. By the time he arrives, an ambulance has removed the body, and the club’s staff and patrons have vanished. Was Jackie’s death an accident or was she pushed? Meanwhile, Kate is contacted by a former boyfriend, who asks her to help him find his singer girlfriend, Marie Collins, who left Liverpool for London hoping to be signed by Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, and has not been heard from since. Marie’s trail eventually leads to the Late Supper Club. Readers will enjoy Hall’s convincing picture of 1960s London, especially as viewed through the eyes of Barnard, a square copper who’s trying to come to terms with a changing society.
October 1, 2018
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll threaten the peace on DS Harry Barnard's Soho beat.Life was simpler back in the days when East End thug Ray Robertson ran the Delilah Club. Ray and his younger brother, Georgie, were as bent as they come, but they kept order on the streets so that everyone could go out in the evening and have a good time. Now Georgie's in stir, Ray's missing, and the council is threatening to chuck Ma Robertson in an old age home so they can knock down her decrepit house and rehab the whole block. The Robertsons' absence leaves the field open for dodgy fellows like Hugh Mercer to open new places like The Late Supper Club, places where musicians have their own private entrance so they can bring in whomever they like and whatever chemical enhancements they like and no one's the wiser--places where an underage girl can fall out an upper-story window and no one can say how she fell or whom she came with or even what her name is. DS Barnard, despite his fondness for sharp clothes and flashy cars, hates this latest fashion in crime. So in spite of his superiors' instance that he keep to the jobs he's assigned--investigating the wave of violence against Soho's cafe and bar owners, most likely at the hands of a Maltese mob looking to run a protection racket--Harry insists on nosing into the young partygoer's death. His inquiry collides with the latest mission of his girlfriend, photographer Kate O'Donnell: helping her former beau, aspiring Liverpool musician Dave Donovan, locate his new girlfriend, singer Marie Collins, who's disappeared on a quest to find a London agent.The combination of murder, menace, and sexual jealousy provides Hall (Cover Up, 2017, etc.) a combustible mix, but the ensuing fireworks, both figurative and literal, provide her seventh entry more heat than light.
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