A Tangled Thread

November 16, 2015
This baffling standalone from British author Fraser (The Unburied Past) deals sensitively with issues of family and relationships. In East Sussex, piano teacher Jill Lawrence is content to share a house with her grown daughter and her daughter’s family, though she misses her husband, a freelance photographer, who died in a suicide bombing in Egypt the previous year. In Scotland, Beth Monroe, a childless widow, has become attached to her new lodger, Johnnie Stewart, but she is dismayed when he disappears one day. After a week, Beth goes to the police, who show her a photograph of Johnnie and tell her he’s been stabbed to death. A third, seemingly unrelated plot line involves an extended family in North Yorkshire. Keeping track of all the characters can be a challenge, and frequent changes of locale make for choppy pacing. Still, Fraser does her usual fine job of planting red herrings and subtle clues to the puzzle’s solution as her well-crafted plot builds to a surprising conclusion.

Starred review from December 1, 2015
Three families, unknown to each other, are about to get the biggest shock of their lives. For Beth Monroe in Scotland, the boarder she took in and fell head over heels for has disappeared. In Sussex, Jill Lawrence and her two grown children are just beginning to recover from the tragic death of their husband and father in a suicide bombing in Egypt. David and William Gregory of Yorkshire have just lost their mother, but they never knew their father, who died in a train crash decades earlier. When a man is found stabbed to death in an alley in Scotland, none of the family members has any idea that this grisly discovery will change their lives forever. Added to the complex plot are a series of art thefts, a hit-and-run accident, a burgeoning romance, and a sordid affair. In hands less capable than Fraser's, this complicated mix might have been confusing, but the genre veteran offers a taut, moving story of love, loss, hate, and redemption that will keep readers enthralled from the first page until the devastating climax, when all of the disparate pieces fall tragically into place. Fine popular fiction for mystery and romance readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

November 1, 2015
A murdered man in Blaircomrie, Scotland, seems to have no identity; then he has too many. Beth Monroe has become so attached to her charming new lodger, Johnnie Stewart, that she's shattered when he goes out one day and never comes back. At length, she reports his disappearance to the police. It turns out that he's been stabbed to death, but the toughest part of the case may be identifying him, for he's certainly not Johnnie Stewart. An artist's sketch of the dead man that appears in the papers proves a stunning shock to two different families. In Stonebridge, North Yorkshire, the Gregory family is dealing with the sudden death of their mother, Sally, in a car accident. When their grandparents see the picture, they have to tell David and Will and their wives that they think the unidentified man is their father, Lawrence Gregory, who's supposed to have died 30 years ago. At Foxclere in East Sussex, another family has been dealing with a recent shock, the death of Greg Lawrence in a terrorist bombing in Egypt. When Jill Lawrence and her married children, Richard and Georgia, see the picture in the paper, they do not want to believe it is Greg, and Jill goes to Scotland with a recent picture for Beth Monroe to identify. What this all has to do with a hit-and-run in Scotland and several robberies in East Sussex is just another puzzle for the police to solve while the families wrestle with problems of their own, exacerbated by the possibility of newfound relatives. Once again, Fraser (The Unburied Past, 2013, etc.) uses complicated domestic relationships as the basis for a good mystery served up with plenty of family angst.

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