Monday With Kaye: "The Sound of Broken Glass" by Deborah Crombie (Reviewed by Kaye George)

This week Kaye George offers her thoughts on another author and series I have not read. According to the all-powerful and all-knowing Amazon, The Sound of Broken Glass published in February of 2013 is the 15^th novel in a series that began in 1993 with A Share In Death.

The Sound of Broken Glass by Deborah Crombie

Crombie just gets better and better. This Kincaid and Gemma British procedural mystery gripped me from beginning to end.

The story opens with the glass in a shop window tossing one of the characters back fifteen years. From there, alternating the present day story with the older one, the reader can barely get up for a drink of water, following the stories of Andy, a gifted guitarist with an inauspicious beginning in life, his fellow band members, his manager, and a producer who may be the making of Andy, and tracing the stories of two barristers who are found dead in exactly the same manner, apparently by the same murderer, though there seems to be no connection between them.

The Crystal Palace building, built in 1851 as a modern marvel of engineering, and enduring as a spectacle in another form at another site well into the next century, was destroyed by fire in 1936. The south London area where it last stood is now called Crystal Palace, and it is here that the story takes place.

Gemma is on this case while her husband, Kincaid is on Daddy Duty for their three adopted children. That’s because the youngest, three-year-old Charlotte, can’t attend her nursery school because she’s terrified of new people and situations, so Kincaid is stuck. He’s getting restless being away from work this long. Gemma’s partner, Melody, an unlikely cop from a privileged background, gets herself into some trouble that not only gets in the way of the investigation, but threatens to ruin things for several people.

Not wanting to ruin this read for you, I’ll quit here. But there’s a lot more to this tale than I can squeeze in this review.

Bonus: a delightful tour of London, with local history, thrown in by way of the chapter headers.

Reviewed by Kaye George author of  Broke for Suspense Magazine