Nor All Your Tears

February 13, 2012
Set in 1977, McCarthy’s follow-up to 2010’s Dying to Know offers an uneasy mix of violent death and whimsy. Soon after South London police surgeon Lance Elliot and his veterinarian girlfriend, Max, attend parents’ night at a local school to support a project of his eccentric father, the body of a P.E. teacher shows up, battered with a dumbbell. Someone later jams a compass through a math teacher’s eye, and a biology teacher is drowned with a frog in his mouth. As dyspeptic Inspector Masson observes, bizarre murders appear to pop up whenever one of the Elliots is around. Meanwhile, Max attracts a vicious stalker. Some may find the mayhem at odds with the cheerfully arch narrative, which emphasizes Lance’s intelligence while revealing his personal ineptitude, as he fails to notice how his innocent friendship with an attractive policewoman upsets Max. Readers with a taste for verbal cleverness and retro slang will be most rewarded.

March 1, 2012
Dr. Lance Elliot (Dying to Know, 2010) returns to deal with the ever-widening contagion of homicide that bids fair to decimate Croydon. Nobody at Bensham Manor School thinks it greatly amiss when PE teacher Marlene Jeffries is bashed to death with a dumbbell. After all, it's widely assumed that Thornton Heath physician Lance Elliot--whose father's inamorata, Ada Clarke, is the head dinner lady at the school--attracts corpses wherever he goes. Inspector Masson duly arrests caretaker George Cotterill, whose dicky heart gives out while he's in custody. Case closed--until Yvette Mangon, a math teacher at Bensham Manor, is stabbed to death with a compass. Yvette, it turns out, was much more than just Marlene's landlady, and their unorthodox domestic arrangements may well have inflamed murderous passions. But then why would someone go on to drown biology teacher Jeremy Gillman and leave him with a frog in his mouth? The link between each dead teacher and the symbol of his or her subject matter seems promising. But when McCarthy, whose metier is grisly forensics (Soul Seeker, 2011, etc.), adds an accidental death, a suicide, a threatening ex-brother-in-law and whoever killed the pet rabbit of veterinarian Maxine Christy, Dr. Elliot's girlfriend, you have to wonder if he's asking you to accept a little too much of the cozy gardens of Bensham. Though the locals complain that murder victims seem to pile up in Dr. Elliott's wake, that's no more than a convention of the genre. The real problem here is the number of independent malefactors working at cross-purposes to keep the population down.

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April 1, 2012

It's a sweltering summer in 1970s south London, and Dr. Lance Elliot has his hands full with his own practice and the extra work he does as a police consultant. Humoring his dad, Ben, a slightly dotty widower, Lance attends an open house at the local school where Ben volunteers. Soon, the Elliots' personal lives overlap precariously with Lance's medical caseload when a series of teacher deaths indicate someone has a vendetta against the faculty. Making things juicier is a stalker targeting Lance's girlfriend; Lance also has to chase after his ex-brother-in-law, who revels in harassment. It sounds grimmer than it really is: a bit of mayhem, comic dialog, father-son camaraderie, and an exasperated Detective Inspector Masson, who wonders how he ever got mixed up with the Elliots. VERDICT This soft-boiled whodunit is an engaging second outing (Dying To Know) for the father-son duo. Although it revolves around a serial killer case, a lighter tone runs throughout. The author's 1977 setting is spot-on, reminiscent of that old Dick Van Dyke TV series Diagnosis Murder, only set in London.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2012
It's July 1977, and teachers who work at Bensham Manor School are being murdered. Dr. Lance Elliot, a London GP and police surgeon, labors to find the killer, especially since he's concerned for his father, Benjamin, who volunteers as leader of the Horticultural Club at the school. Benjamin, involved with a school employee, Ada Clarke, he hopes to marry despite her wildly dysfunctional family, feels that the police are focusing on the wrong man and encourages Lance to push them in a new direction. Further complicating matters, Lance's mentally ill former brother-in-law, Tristan, who blames Lance for his sister's death, is stalking Lance's current girlfriend, Max. Low-key humor, a busy but twisty and engaging plot, eccentric characters, and intriguing details of a GP's life combine in this leisurely-paced mystery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)