DI Stratton
3 total works
London, November, 1956. DI Ted Stratton is tasked with investigating the murder of Jeremy Lloyd, a strange young man with a taste for esoteric religion. Stratton's enquiries lead him to Suffolk, where the mysterious Mr Roth has founded a Foundation for Spiritual Understanding. Apparently Lloyd had believed himself marked out for great things. But at the Foundation, Stratton meets twelve-year-old Michael who is proclaimed as the next incarnation in a long line of spiritual leaders that stretches back to Christ and Buddha. He is rumoured amongst Roth's disciples to have been immaculately conceived, but the woman who is said to be his mother, and whose photograph was cherished by Lloyd, has disappeared. When a woman's body is found in woods nearby, Stratton initially assumes he has found 'the mother', but the reality turns out to be far stranger and far more terrifying...
It is winter, 1949. London is cold and grey, and pock-marked everywhere with the scars of war. When John Davies confesses to killing his wife and baby daughter in their Notting Hill digs, it promises to be a depressingly straightforward case for DI Ted Stratton of West End Central. But then Davies recants and blames a fellow tenant, Norman Backhouse, for the crimes. Though some of the evidence appears to be ambiguous, Stratton sees no reason to believe him. The case against Davies proceeds: he is convicted, still protesting his innocence to the end. A few months later discoveries are made at Davies's old home. Backhouse has vanished, but his flat and garden are full of the corpses of women who have been gassed, raped and strangled. Has Stratton caused an innocent man to hang? Worse still, he's afraid that someone he loves may be the next victim.
This is the 5th historical mystery in the award-winning "Inspector Stratton" series. Having started during the Blitz with Innocent Spy, we have now arrived at the summer of 1958. Detective Inspector Stratton is investigating the murder of a rent collector in Notting Hill, a part of London seething with racial tensions between Caribbean immigrants and their white working class neighbors. And then a second body makes it pretty clear that race is a key element to these murders. Like the rest of the series, The Riot is based on real events and characters, on which it sheds new and revealing light. It is both an involving murder mystery, and a fascinating dive into London life in 1958, full of both details of daily life, and cameos by notorious public figures. If the name "Notting Hill" brings to mind a certain Hugh Grant movie, you will be very surprised to uncover the story of that neighborhood in its much less fancy days.