2019 mystery, fifth in its series. It's eleven years later, and the
mods and rockers are threatening Brighton. But also a schoolgirl has
gone missing…
Everyone was happy at the end of the last book, so to make them
miserable again Griffiths has to jump forward. Max has found success
as a film star, and is married to one of the Great Beauties of the
screen, but comes back to England for a funeral and a possible film
deal. Edgar and Emma are married with children, but she's regretting
having to give up her job and be only a wifeandmother.
There's definitely more fragmentation this time; Edgar's now a
superintendent and controlling the whole investigation, while still
not giving up a bit of fieldwork, but several of the police characters
get scenes from their own viewpoints, and of course Max and Emma have
their own narratives. In that way it feels more like a TV drama
series, with five or six main cast members each of whom gets to do
parts of their own ongoing plots as well as participating in the case
of the week.
The risk of course is that those ongoing plots may come to seem more
interesting than the case of the week, and certainly there are
developments at the end of this book that leave me impatient to learn
more. Still, I think I'm mostly glad that Griffiths left the 1950s
before she'd worn her inspiration completely flat on them; perhaps the
Whitsun weekend of 1964 is an easy target, but Griffiths has done a
bit of research on the mods and rockers rather than just writing them
off with stereotypes.
Definitely more about the time and the people than about the
investigation, but I've come to expect that from Griffiths, and I'm
still finding these people interesting.
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