Shadow Play

I read the Kindle Edition.

4 stars

DCI Slider and DS Atherton respond to a body in a broken-down auto repair shop. The deceased is a well -dressed man completely out of place in that neighborhood. He has no identification on him. The shop owner says he does not know the man.

They begin the investigation by interviewing the local citizenry. They learn some interesting facts and local history about the owner of the shop but little else. They talk to Eli, the shop owner’s, wife and she basically unloads on them. Eventually, the dead man’s girlfriend comes in and identifies him. He is a Mr. King. She doesn’t know exactly who he worked for or what he did for a living.

The autopsy reveals many old fractures of Mr. King’s bones and other wounds that indicate that he has had a rough life. DCI Slider and his team begin to wonder if this guy was someone’s enforcer – like a crime boss.

This is a true police procedural. The story develops slowly and through patient and professional police work. They interview witnesses, follow clues and are proactive in identifying the man and seeking his killer.

This book is very well written and plotted as are all of Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’ novels. The suspense begins immediately, but builds rather slowly as the police investigation proceeds. I liked the way DCI Slider’s team pulled together at their mutual tasks. DCI Slider himself seemed a true professional. I have not read very many of Ms. Harrod-Eagles’ novels, but I am re-committed to reading more of them.

I want to thank NetGalley and Black Thorn for forwarding to me a copy of this great book to read and enjoy.

I would like to thank Netgalley and Severn House for an advance copy of Shadow Play, the twentieth novel to feature Bill Slider of The Met.

Bill and the team are called out to a suspicious death. The body of a man in his 50s has been found near a rundown backstreet garage but with nothing in his pockets to identify him the team have difficulty knowing where to start and Superintendent Porson wants them to keep it low key i.e. low budget. That changes when they identify the corpse and discover that he was positioning himself to blackmail a senior politician.

I thoroughly enjoyed Shadow Play. It is a straightforward police procedural where the slow uncovering of facts leads to the solution. It could be regarded as old fashioned but I prefer the term traditional in the sense that the narrative is told wholly from the investigators' point of view and it is up to the reader to try and get there first. I guessed bits of it but nowhere near the whole so it is an engrossing puzzle. I really like this approach and enjoy trying to work out the story of the murder. I also like the marrying of the traditional investigation with the latest technology where CCTV, ANPR and phone data play a large part.

As fits a more traditional novel characterisation plays second fiddle to plotting. The reader never really gets to know Bill Slider whom I suspect of being a bit bolshie under his calm exterior. The rest of the team are fairly interchangeable and I still had difficulty separating one from the other by the end of the novel. It's mostly unimportant as they work as a cohesive team although their bickering can be amusing.

Shadow Play is a good read which I have no hesitation in recommending.

Shadow Play by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles is a well written British police procedural. The story starts right out with the crime and slowly unfolds. I enjoyed the characters and how their stories were weaved into the storyline. The mystery kept me guessing, and the writer's humor was a nice touch throughout the book.

This book can be read as a standalone. I didn't feel I missed out on anything from not having read previous books.

Although part of a series this can be read as a stand alone, Fsi Slider and Ds Atherton are the 2 main characters and seem to work really well together with no upper handness

An unidentified man is found in a bidy repair shop and with no identification they need to learn the identity before the discover what lead him to being there and who had the need to kill him

Don't you just love to begin reading a book and feel that you've slipped right into it in a comfortable, natural way? That's what it's like for me with a Detective Chief Inspector Bill Slider book from Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. This time a dead body has been found outside a motor repair business that is so isolated you have to be from that part of town to even know it exists. So who is the dead man and is there any significance for his body being dumped in Jacket's Yard? No way to identify the man so Slider's team has to begin this one with old fashioned methods of investigating.

All the crew is back in this story. I always look forward to finding out how Detective Superintendent Porson will mangle common sayings, but it's done in such a low key way that I enjoy the humor without feeling the boss is being poked fun at. Slider's family is always percolating along in the background but never to the extent that they take over the story and shove the mystery into the background. I also enjoy watching out for the vocabulary words I have to look up. Thanks, Ms. Harrod-Eagles for adding to my word cache. Although I'm having a hard time working crepuscular or uxorious into casual conversation.

For me, once again, a superb reading experience. I need to check over the past titles in this series because I have a feeling I've missed one or two along the way. Thank you to NetGalley and Black Thorn for an e-galley of this novel.

Bill Slider is a great character and I have enjoyed reading the books in this series. Good read and the author is good at describing the scene - I felt like I knew the part of London the book was set it. A fine installment in the series

A good honest crime novel , an intriguing story line that keeps the reader involved though out the story. Look forward to catching up with Bill Slider and with his team of unusual characters in more novels.

First Sentence: Where roads and railways cross old-established ground, there are bound to be odd triangles leftover, too small or too ill-favoured for development.

A well-dressed corpse with no identification turns up in the yard of an auto repair shop. The owner can’t identify him, nor does the flash-drive the police find in the victim’s pocket although it suggests he was blackmailing an MP associated with an important government project. The autopsy exposes a man whose injuries are at odds with his appearance. Was he working for someone else? It’s up to Inspector Bill Slider and his team to find the answers.

There is nothing better than a clean opening; no prologue, just straight into the story and, in this case, the crime. An observation point for those who are Anglophiles is how nice it is to have a British mystery that hasn’t been Americanized either in spelling or in vocabulary—“Lots of tyre tracks,”—although do have a sweater, rather than a jumper. Ah, well.

The author’s wry humor is always in evidence, as well as her use of dialect to establish a character's geographic, education, and economic background—“Ooh, look who it is. I ‘ope we’re no in dutch,’ Mrs. Sid said jocularly. …’We ha’n’t got any tofu, darlin’.’—but never so that it is cumbersome to read. Her descriptions of people are a treat—”in the entrance foyer was a very large bald bouncer. His shoulders and chest were big enough to warrant their own postcode and made the rest of this body appear unnaturally tapered. He looked like what you’d get if you shaved a buffalo.” CH-E is very good at bringing all her characters to life.

One of the great appeals of Harrod-Eagles books is the characters and that she has created a true ensemble cast. We come to know each member of Slider’s team, and appreciate how each has their individual role within the team, but that they work as a unit. Yet the cast also extends to their personal relationships; their families. The characters are truly well-developed, each with their own personalities, such as Porson, Slider’s boss, with the way in which he mangles clichés—“You ought to be seeing the light for the trees by now.’ But in the end, it is still Slider who leads the team and demonstrates the reason why he is in charge, such as his deduction of how to find what the killer sought.

The balance between working the case and the teams’ personal lives, particularly Slider’s is nicely done. Even though it plays a smaller role in this book than previous ones, it always adds a dash of realism to brighten the story.

CH-E’s thoughtfulness is another of the many attractions to her writing—“Slider drifted a little, thinking about mankind’s propensity to turn any investigation to a harmful purpose. … Oh, Mankind! Would you ever get your act together?”. She thinks about the small things: not only in the crime and it’s detection, but about society in general—“the catch-up meeting was held over lunch in the CID room. …All human life is here, Slider thought. You could write a treatise about how the lunchtime sarnie is a window on the soul.” A line toward the end really does say it all—“The absurdity of human ambition and human endeavor never failed to strike Slider.”
“Shadow Play” is a very well-written, solid police procedural with excellent characters, and humor, but also things about which to think.

SHADOW PLAY (Police Proc-Bill Slider-England-Contemp) – VG
Harrod-Eagles, Cynthia – 20th in series
Severn House – Feb 2018

This is another excellent Bill Slider book. Slider and Atherton are called to Jacket's Yard, a hidden place near the railroad with narrow access and no CCTV, traffic, or pedestrians. There is a body lying in the mud near a car repair place. The dead man is well dressed, but his pockets have been emptied. It took awhile to find out the corpse's name. Fortunately, the SOC found a recent lottery ticket hidden in his pocket. The store where he bought it was able to give them a name, Leon King. The helpful thing was his apartment was right across from where he bought the ticket, but it had been thoroughly searched.

Slider went back to the apartment and finally found a thumb drive which showed three men in the nude sniffing coke. The police managed to follow a black BMW through many CCTV cameras several showing Kimmelman driving, and surmised he might have been involved in blackmail and could be someone's enforcer. Then Slider is almost run down by a black BMW which was purposely aiming for him; the car looked suspiciously like the car Kimmelman had been driving during the filming operation. It took great police work to figure out why Kimmelman was killed and who did it!

A mysterious body is found near an auto shop in a derelict corner of Shepherd’s Bush. With no ID and the auto shop owner claiming he’s never seen the man, Bill Slider has quite the mystery to solve. What was a smartly dressed man doing out here and who is he? With the rest of his team of detectives, Slider will piece together the puzzle.

Again I’m hopping smack into the middle of a series. When I began this book, I didn’t realize it was number 20 (20!) of the Bill Slider mysteries. Perhaps that is why I was a bit confused by the number of characters to follow. Even still, I enjoyed this book quite a bit. British mysteries have been sprinkled throughout my to-read list lately. I find them a nice break from other genres I read.

Cynthia Harrod-Eagles is clearly a prolific author with the number of series I found of hers on Goodreads. She writes a nice procedural. Plenty of questions to be answered, it wasn’t clear who was responsible until nearly the end. I loved the way she wove some human interest into the story as well. A very well rounded mystery, I will look forward to others in this series.

3.75 stars


This review will be posted at BookwormishMe.com on 20 February 2020

A good police procedural, engrossing and entertaining.
I liked the fleshed out cast of characters and the solid mystery that kept me guessing.
I like this series and was happy to read this instalment.
A good read, recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

DID Bill Slider, Sgt. Atherton and the Shepherd's Bush team tackle the case of an unidentified body found in a muddy car repair shop. The Bill Slider series is fine example of the British police procedural. Stepping into one of these books is a bit like coming home. The characters feel like old friends, and the settings are comfortable. Herrod-Eagles's sense of humor shines through, lightening even the darkest moments of crime fighting. Shadow Play is the twentieth book in the series, but it is every bit as enticing as the first! Highly recommended. Thanks to Black Thorn and NetGalley for the ARC of this novel in return for this honest review.

Slider and Atherton are on the case again, me lads, in Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’ “Shadow Play,” the twentieth in the series of Brit police procedurals. And as usual, they are well-written, thoroughly plotted and thoroughly entertaining.

I should say at this point that it’s probably not a good idea to jump in to the series with this book – I mean, there are nineteen before this. Okay, go ahead and read this one, and then go back and start from the beginning. You won’t regret it.

Also, as per usual, the chapter headings are hilarious. My favorites – “Never Say Leather Again,” followed in a close second by “In Which We Swerve.” You’ll have your favorites, I’m sure.

Our plot – a body found in an out of the way car repair place. Why there is already a question at the beginning, of course. And who the well-dressed bloke is, another. There’s no identification on the body. Our detectives find out the dead man was presumably a blackmailer, and it’s off to find out why, and who the intended victim was.

In between we get the little domestic scenes that humanize these often-grim detective stories, with Joanna, Slider’s wife, and George, his young son. Then there’s Emily, Atherton’s (current) girlfriend, who’s looking more and more steady. Their little stories bring light and life to the pages, rounding out these fictional people to be near real and near breathing. It’s extremely satisfying to read about them. And we mustn’t forget about Superintendent Porson. His contributions are gold mines, mere tidbits, but they move the story along in supervisory ways and leave you smiling at the same time.

The dead man turns out to be the driver for a local businessman, who of course denies “all knowledge.” One begins to know what this is all about – the thrill is with going along with our senior policemen and the rest of the coppers as they build the case, clue by clue. And it all comes down to greed and cover-ups and dodgy deals guaranteed to bring in more money. Business and power and greed. A recipe for disaster – murderous disaster, anyroad.

And the crew gets to sit around and discuss it, and we get to listen in – ‘tis wonderful, that. And while they’re doing it, Ms. Harrod-Eagles can further entertain with gems like this, writing of one of Slider’s subordinates with a new, luxurious mustache: “There were baleen whales that had less to filter with.” Spend a few hours reading this book, gentle readers, you won’t be disappointed.

Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for a copy of this book, in exchange for this review.

The always excellent Cynthia Harrod-Eagles has done it again. This installment of the Bill Slider police procedural series is as wonderful as the preceding ones. Bill Slider is the head of a team of detectives at the Shepherd’s Bush police station in London. In this book, a body is found in a rarely frequented yard near a garage. The police are called in, and the investigation begins.

“Shadow Play” is the twentieth (I think) in the Bill Slider series, but can easily be read as a standalone. For those of us who are familiar with them, the whole gang of detectives is here, and welcome. This is a well-oiled team, and this book flows along, taking the reader on an enjoyable journey. This is not a cozy mystery, of course, but it is not particularly gory either. Harrod-Eagles plays fair with the reader, and one sees the evidence as it is uncovered. I don’t like spoilers, so I will say no more about the plot.

If you like mysteries or police procedurals you can never go wrong with one of Harrod-Eagles books about Bill Slider and the men and women of Shepherd’s Bush. The author shows the human, private side of the characters, as well as always a cracking mystery. Her books don’t drag and you really want to find out whodunnit. Do yourself a favor and pick up, “Shadow Play,” you will be glad you did.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC. The opinions are my own.