Loud music is blaring and one neighbour can’t stand it any longer. He storms round to Miles’ flat and breaks downs the door before smashing the sound system. But then he finds Miles’ body on the floor and becomes the prime suspect in the initial murder investigation. DCI Roscoe and his team
Heir To Murder is the 5th book to feature DCI Gavin Roscoe and his team. I have previously read and reviewed books 1 and 4 from the series: Murder on Oxford Lane and Out For Revenge.
At first glance, the murder case looks straightforward. An unplanned attack by a neighbour driven to the edge by relentless loud music. Digging a little deeper, DCI Roscoe finds out that the victim is from a privileged family but has become estranged. The case meanders through false alibis, blackmail, affairs, and another murders.
Roscoe is preparing for his son’s wedding but this new case requires all his attention. I enjoyed his stable home life and the lack of typical dysfunctional relationships and behaviours that are usually common among police characters. DS Sunita Roy’s character continues to shine. She has good intuition and this leads her to make a number of surprising discoveries that help solve the case. Meanwhile in her private life, her boyfriend is trying to persuade her to invest some money and I was surprised she was not more suspicious!
I think this series goes from strength to strength. The writing style is easy to read and the detective characters are easy to like so I felt invested in wanting them to succeed in catching the killer. There are plenty of twists and I had no idea which way the plot was heading or who was responsible for the crimes.
Heir To Murder is an entertaining police procedural with strong lead detectives.
Heir To Murder
When a neighbour from hell comes to a sticky end, a plucky cop refuses to accept the obvious.
Miles Kenworth loves to play his rock music at a deafening volume. The other residents of his apartment block are not so keen.
One day, after hearing a commotion, Miles’ next-door neighbour discovers his body lying in a pool of blood.
Standing next to the corpse is Jake, the man who lives upstairs.
It should be an open and shut case for DS Sunita Roy. But with Jake vehemently protesting his innocence, she decides to dig deeper.
Most of the residents wanted Miles shut up for good. But was it really Jake who flipped, or was he just in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Author Bio – Tony is a former Fleet Street journalist. Tony decided to set this string of novels in Warwickshire and Worcestershire after spending many happy years working as a newspaper reporter in Worcester.
He first developed a love of writing at the age of nine when he and a friend produced a magazine called the Globe at their junior school in Sevenoaks, Kent. When he reached his teenage years, growing up in Tunbridge Wells, his local vicar staged one of his plays, about Naboth’s Vineyard.
At Hull University, Tony was named student journalist of the year in 1971 in a competition run by Time-Life magazine and went onto become a national newspaper journalist, mainly working for the Sunday People in both its newsroom and investigations department.
His very first book to be published, the crime novel Smile Of The Stowaway, was released in December 2018. It concerns a Kent couple who harbour a stowaway and then battle to clear his name when he is charged with murder.
Then, in March 2020, the spy novel The Lazarus Charter, was released. It involves foreign agents operating in the UK. The book has kindly been endorsed by Marina Litvinenko, widow of the murdered Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, and by Stan and Caroline Sturgess, parents of the innocent mother-of-three poisoned with novichok in Salisbury in 2018.
Tony, who has written several other novels which are as yet unpublished, has five grown-up children. He is a Life Member of the National Union of Journalists. He lives in South-East London with his partner Lin.
Loud music is blaring and one neighbour can’t stand it any longer. He storms round to Miles’ flat and breaks downs the door before smashing the sound system. But then he finds Miles’ body on the floor and becomes the prime suspect in the initial murder investigation. DCI Roscoe and his team
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