A Meeting of Minds: A Superintendent Mike Yeadings Mystery

By Clare Curzon

Book Overview

Superintendent Mike Yeadings' sergeant, Rosemary Zyczynski, (call her Z) had a psychic itch about her landlady's celebration dinner. Did you get a feeling, she asks her lover, Max, that there's more going on under this roof than readily meets the eye? Rosemary couldn't have been righter. The dinner was in honor of the new house - a large, once private mansion that had been through numerous changes of face throughout the years. Now Z's landlady had bought it to replace her original dingy building, and Rosemary had moved with her from the old to the new. The partry was to welcome the tenants of the several new apartments that had been made in the new house. Z's uneasiness about her fellow tenants was quickly forgotten; she had more pressing problems of her own. Yeadings was about to choose either Rosemary or Beaumont, his other sergeant, to promote to inspector, and the unavoidable subsurface rivalry between the two very different police detectives had raised a barrier that hindered them in their work. The work they did have came close to Rosemary herself and startled her into remembering her words to Max. The body of one of the tenants, a single woman who had moved in with her mother, was found brutally murdered, and the case naturally was Yeadings' responsibility and thus that of Rosemary and Beaumont. Curzon uncannily keeps on bringing her readers believable characters, both the stalwart Yeadings and his Woman Friday, Z, as well as whole groups of once-a-book individuals who set a reader right smack in the middle of the little English town and the puzzling and intriguing crime that can be found there.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 031231874X
• ISBN13: 9780312318741
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.83 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.6" x 1.0" x 5.7"

Customer Reviews

excellent British police procedural

Just back from a family vacation in warm Madeira, Detective Superintendent Mike Yeadings realizes the cold is inside his bones proving he has not adjusted to winter, which remains a month away. At least the naked corpse except for the fur coat was not found in the river, but instead in a pub yard in Henley on Thames. Mike and his team arrive on site to determine whether a crime was committed or a sad natural death occurred. Detective Sergeant Rosemary "Z" Zycynski immediately identifies the dead person as her Ashbourne House neighbor, Sheila Winter. Z explains to Mike that elderly Beattie Weyman recently bought Ashbourne House and converted it into luxury apartments. She also says that the victim owned a garden centre and shared her flat with her mother. As far as Z knew Sheila had nothing else in her life. Concluding murder occurred Mike and his Thames Valley team investigates the neighbors to uncover what happened to Sheila. The Thames Valley CID mysteries are excellent British police procedurals with this entry being the usual superb investigative tale. The brisk story line takes off once the freezing Mike arrives at the crime scene and never decelerates until the case is solved. Mike is a terrific protagonist, but Z plays the centrist role as the victim was her neighbor and she more or less knows the other residents of Ashbourne House. An intriguing sidebar is the motive behind why Beattie converted the house as this lonely senior with the victim brings a message that everyone needs companionship. Ms. Curzon's latest tour of the Thames is a winner. Harriet Klausner