"A Long Shadow" by H L Marsay

I love mysteries, and especially British mysteries, and it’s always fun to discover a new writer and a new series. 

John Shadow is the detective chief inspector for the city of York. Middle-aged, unmarried, and something of a curmudgeon, he is extremely set in his ways. He doesn’t like to drive, he eats most of his meals at a set group of restaurants and doesn’t like interruptions while he’s eating, and he lives on a boat docked along the Ouse River.

 

Street cleaners find a body of a young woman in a doorway; she’d been living at a refuge called The Haven. The autopsy shows she’d been poisoned – the cyanide delivered in a bottle of vodka. Within days, two more people, both homeless, are found dead from the same cause. Someone is giving people bottles of poisoned vodka. 

 

H L Marsay

Then a skeleton is discovered in an abandoned tunnel under museum park and near the river. While local archaeologists had hoped it was a find within their domain, the skeleton turns out to be that of a young woman from 32 years before – a friend of several people connected to the recent murders who was believed to have drowned. The examination of the skeleton shows she’d been murdered from blows to the head.

 

In A Long Shadow by H L Marsay, DCI Shadow and his team have to sort through past and present, old and new motives, and old and new passions to learn what has been happening to homeless people, and what happened to a teenager more than three decades ago. The story has a lot of details and angles (not to mention walking tours of central York) that have to be managed, and Marsay does that very well indeed. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable story.

 

Marsay is the author of six mystery novels in the DCI John Shadow series. A member of the Crime Writers Association, she lives with her family in the city of York in England.