Bleeding Heart Square
by Andrew Taylor
Michael Joseph, HK$255
Fog, grime, hunger and the stench of cigarettes: London in its inter-war years seeps from the pages of this murder mystery, set among the inhabitants of a run-down square near the diamond markets of Hatton Garden and Holborn, close to the centre of the city.
Andrew Taylor's heroine is Lydia, a battered woman married to Marcus Langstone, a repugnant, failing aristocrat. Fleeing the blows from this rising star of the British Union of Fascists, her path takes her to her estranged father's house on Bleeding Heart Square.
The square is the focal point for an odd assortment of characters, many of them trapped in a downward spiral from better days. Lydia's father, Captain Ingleby-Lewis, is a drunkard - worse, a fraudster who was pensioned out of the army. Downstairs lives the grasping Mr Fimberry, with his musty collection of books. Looming above, and metaphorically over them, is Joseph Serridge, the landlord, whose wife owned the house until she mysteriously disappeared.