Kissed A Sad Goodbye
   Deborah Crombie
  1999 Bantam Books NY USA
   ISBN: 055310943X


A woman's body is found, carefully arranged to preserve her modesty, in an East London park. This is no simple robbery or assault. Duncan Kincaid & Gemma James of Scotland Yard, both experiencing change in their lives, investigate along the isolated roads of the Isle of Dogs.

The case becomes complicated when the woman is identified as the bold & brilliant head of a family-owned tea company, with fiance, sister, father & a business with failing finances.

One of the aspects of reading a Deborah Crombie novel is the many layers of past & present into which she draws you. In Kissed A Sad Goodbye she goes into the distant past with the great tea trade & the not so far past when the Phony War was stretching everyone's nerves & eventually the children of London were evacuated into the countryside away from the expected bombing.(I was one of those!)

Still another layer is the relationship between Duncan & the son of his ex-wife, Kit. Another is the many single parenthood issues with which Duncan is beginning to wrestle & with which Gemma & other police women have been struggling for years now. Then there is their own relationship that sometimes blooms & sometimes disappears under the pressures of the case at hand.

Deborah Crombie evokes the East End of London, the history of the River Thames & modern real estate practices with effective, readable descriptions. Everyone could have been your neighbor, the people you see everyday going about their lives & into which has erupted one moment of tragic rage.

Just because Annabelle Hammond was a headstrong, go-getter executive doesn't mean she's a prime target to be murdered. As Duncan & Gemma explore the leads & lives of the people who knew Annabelle, we are taken back to a Surrey estate during the war; into an old warehouse where the scent of tea & polish evoke a time of the great clipper ships; into the gentrification of a dilapidated dockland where deals to rebuild grind to a halt when finances flag; into the quiet back lanes where grieving relatives & neighbors live out their insulated lives.

Kissed A Sad Goodbye is about honor, courage & love - about the abuse of power, about cowardice & madness that drives sons to hate fathers, friend to betray friend, father to sacrifice child. It is also about living your own life & loving those who love you.

Deborah Crombie writes a rich, picturesque murder story & we watch her two protagonists - Duncan & Gemma - mature into new levels of their relationship & meet a few new curious characters.

Very nicely done, a lovely read beside the fireplace & an unpredictable, plenty of red herrings whodunit.

Also by Deborah Crombie: All Shall Be Well; A Share in Death; Leave the Grave Green; Mourn Not Your Dead & Dreaming of the Bones
(01/23/00)

Rebecca