Past Tense

It's been a while since I've read a mystery by Catherine Aird. I first discovered her about twenty years ago. It's hard to believe that she's been writing her Inspector Sloan mysteries for over forty years. Of course now, in Past Tense--the most recent adventure written in 2010--he is a Detective Ch......more

Josephine Short, a woman with few friends and relatives, dies in a nursing home, leaving some unusual requests. Shortly thereafter an intruder enters her room. The attending physician noticed nothing unusual, attributing her death to heart failure. The woman listed a second cousin living nearby as t......more

Maybe comfortable because solution easy to guess from start in slow investigation. Flavor of eccentric England place and people foreign to me. Focus trickily red-herring, suprisingly sideways, on minor character Jan Wakefield, her adulterous husband, their inability to have children, ending "And one......more

Why does Ms. Short want to be buried at the location where no one knows her? There is a break in at the nursing home. Ms.Short's room is broken into but why isn't anything missing? There is a body in the river. Whose body is it? Bill Wakefield comes back from Brazil unannounced, why? These questions and......more

By the time Josephine Short died, she had shut herself off from the world. A surprising number of odd consequences followed her perfectly natural death. Somehow they must have to do with the large fortune she left behind, but her will seems perfectly straightforward. Inspector Sloan has to sort out......more