The Arsenic Labyrinth

November 13, 2006
Edwards's crisply written third contemporary mystery set in England's Lake District (after 2005's The Cipher Garden
) turns on the unsolved disappearance of Emma Bestwick, a woman who went missing a decade earlier. Guy Koenig, a con man recently released from prison, makes an anonymous phone call about Emma's fate to a local journalist who has just revisited her story. DCI Hannah Scarlett, who headed the original inquiry, now focuses her cold case squad on the matter. The predictable police procedure—reinterviewing relatives and friends of the missing woman—gets underway, making little progress until the police receive a tip as to the location of Emma's body. Edwards injects cryptic excerpts of another murder mystery into the narrative and rounds out the story with hints of a frustrated attraction between Hannah and historian Daniel Kind, whose father, Ben, was her mentor. Though the suspense and resolution of the secondary mystery distract from Emma's story, this is solid fare for fans of modern British police procedurals.

Starred review from January 1, 2007
After a newspaper article commemorating the tenth anniversary of Emma Bestwick's disappearance results in a series of anonymous phone tips, Detective Chief Inspector Hannah Scarlett, head of the Cumbria Constabulary's Cold Case Review Team, begins to question Emma's family and friends. Soon, historian Daniel Kind, researching John Ruskin's years in the Lake District, unearths information vital to the case. Edwards, author of seven Harry Devlin novels and two other Lake District mysteries (e.g., "The Cipher Garden"), leads readers down a long and torturous path, handing out pieces of the puzzles and ratcheting up the suspense until the very end. Along the way, he offers tidbits about Ruskin, the history of England's Lake District, and insight into the spooky Arsenic Labyrinth, a dangerous series of tunnels in which tin ore was mined for its arsenic content. Patrons who enjoy challenging mysteries with complex characters, intricate relationships, and dangerous secrets (think Deborah Crombie, P.D. James, and Elizabeth George) will snap this one up.

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.