RogerBW's Blog

1968 mystery, eighth in the series about Chief Inspector, now Superintendent, Henry Tibbett. A minor criminal is shot in a pub toilet; nobody in the private bar next door saw anything, particularly not his fancy girlfriend. But there's more to it than a falling-out among thieves.

It seems at first as though it'll have to be written off as an unsolved tawdry gangland murder, since nobody's saying anything; but then Tibbett runs into the brother of someone from a previous book, a bumptious young man working for a minor international bureaucracy, and he mentions how funny it is that two of the people working on a particular border dispute happen to have died lately. Completely accidental of course. But it doesn't seem to be entirely unconnected…

She laid the papers down on the desk and went back to her own office, closing the door behind her.

Henry looked at Trapp and they both smiled. "She is, isn't she?" said Gordon. "Funnily enough, she is also very nice and very bright, an astonishing combination. I think I shall probably marry her."

"Shall you, indeed? Have you mentioned it to her yet?"

"Dear me, no. My technique is to keep them guessing."

There's a fair bit of investigative footwork, one of the strengths of this series on the rare occasions when it allows Tibbett to be in his native London. The crooks – and it's clear who at least some of them are – make only very minor mistakes, but Tibbett is there to pounce on them. Then it becomes clear that a particular person will become a target, and the action moves to rural Friesland; Moyes is certainly writing with affection and from the life, but it's still a bit of a wrench as everything slows down and the exotic foreign setting is clearly an important element.

At the open door of the plane, Henry and Emmy were surprised to find themselves stepping directly into a long, upward-sloping tunnel, for their plane had taxied into position at the end of one of the giant tentacles which radiate from the main airport building.

(Yes, it's 1969 and this is new and exciting.)

Tibbett uses his wife Emmy as bait again, and once more she seems happy to go along with it. (She doesn't even manage to rescue herself once she is inevitably captured, though she does help to leave a trail.) That left a bit of a bad taste for me, but in all this is another worthy addition to a remarkably varied series.