Erik Lingoss is a personal trainer, working his way up from sweaty gyms to higher class establishments, with individual, wealthy clients. Then he is found dead in his flat by the most recent eager girl he’d dumped, Kelly Ann Hayes. DCI Bill Slider picks his way through gyms and celebs in CRUEL AS THE GRAVE.

If you enjoy British police procedurals, you’ll know the longrunning ‘DCI Bill Slider’ series which centres on the police station at Shepherd’s Bush, London. As well as the determined, affable police crew and wide cast of suspects, we follow Slider’s personal life. His lady wife Joanna is heavily pregnant as the book opens, taking a break from her orchestral work for once. Older children enliven the tale but the focus is on work; the parade of witnesses, relationships and suspects.

I enjoyed the detective work, which is steady and at times repetitive, just like real life. I didn’t find any note of brilliance in the resolution, it’s a matter of leaving no stone unturned. The conversations in the cop-shop contain the usual number of puns and malapropisms, providing genial humour missing from the dirty world of death.  

Cynthia Harrod-Eagles is a prolific novelist, born in Shepherd’s Bush, with many historical tales to her name as well as the Slider series which began with Orchestrated Death and is now at its twenty-second book. If someone you know enjoys crime tales, this might be an ideal gift, or treat yourself to CRUEL AS THE GRAVE, a classic casebook of greed, envy and murder.