A Quiet Kill

Janet Brons

This is a book by a woman who worked for the Canadian Foreign Service for part of her career.  It is set at the High Commission in London England where one of the staff, a public relations person, has been brutally murdered in the High Commission building.  It appears there may be an eco-terrorism connection to the murder as the RCMP officer assigned to the High Commission claims the weapon was a sealing club.

The Brits initiate the investigation of the murder and are soon joined by two RCMP officers from Canada and another Canadian official.  As the site is officially Canadian territory there is some sensitivity as to what the role of the Brits is, but the two teams seem to work together fairly well.  In the staff interviews we meet a strange little woman, who seems to be OCD and mental.  She is obsessed about cleaning the building, patrols the building at the end of the day to clean or check for thefts.  She cooks fabulous meals, imagining a handsome man will arrive someday to share the meals, and then throws them out uneaten.  We also meet the frustrated chef, the Asst. to the Commissioner, the Commissioner who seems to be a decent man and his very rude and hated wife.  We also meet an ecological activist.

Shortly thereafter a man is killed in his fur store.  He and his wife are Canadians, making a living in England.  His wife shows police threatening letters he has received.  The police wonder if both deaths are the act of eco-terrorists and suspect the activist they have interviewed may be responsible.  As the investigations continue they learn that the female victim was pregnant and that she had been having an affair with the Commissioner.  The Commissioner had told his wife he wanted a divorce to marry the victim once his posting in England was over.  Could the wife be the murderer?  But what of the furrier?

The murdered woman's father arrives to claim his daughter's body.  We learn that he was from Bosnia but moved to Montreal where he ran a successful dry cleaning business.  The police then learn that the RCMP officer assigned to the High Commission was stationed in Bosnia and at the time there was suspicion that some of the military people were involved in drug trafficking out of Bosnia to North America.

The police rush to find the RCMP officer but he has been killed by the girl's father.  The father is furious that the RCMP officer, who had been involved with the father in drug trafficking to raise money for Bosnia, did not protect his daughter.  He doesn't realize that it was actually the officer who killed the man's daughter so she would not reveal his and her father's role in drug trafficking.    He murdered the furrier just to confuse the police and try to direct police interest to eco-activists.

This was a small book but very well written.  As it ends it seem like there may be future stories involving the Canadian female RCMP officer and the British Inspector... I hope so.