When a young schoolgirl is found strangled on the golf course in the coastal town of Chalford, the town is gripped by terror until suspicion falls on Dr Terry Kendall, a troubled young man who has conveniently just fallen off a cliff to his death. And when I say fallen, obviously I meant to say pushed…

Terry’s brother, Dr Mark Kendall, arrives to take his place in the practice, convinced that his brother was murdered. As more young girls are found dead, it is clear that the murderer is still at large and, moreover, seems to be a member of a very small circle of people…

Well, I said I was going to do more classic crime reading and that’s three out of three. True, 1972 is somewhat outside the general era regarded as being classic, but there were still writers who were producing well-written mystery stories long after the war years. Dominic Devine (aka D M Devine) first came to my attention a few years ago when John Curran spoke about him and Nigel Fitzgerald at Bodies From The Library 2019. I’m pretty sure I bought something by him to add to the TBR but if I did, I didn’t read it and I can’t find it.

Recently, however, that nice chap Martin Edwards recommended Devine to me as well, so I thought I’d ask Santa for a nice (and fairly cheap) first edition, and to make sure that I read it. And you know what? Martin and John were quite right.

This is Devine’s antepenultimate book. Not sure why, but his first six books were as “D.M.”, the next six as “Dominic” and then the last, published posthumously, as “D.M.” again. Similarly, I’m not sure why the first eleven books were published one per year and thereafter there was a gap of six and three – to be honest, I don’t know much about Devine at all. So let’s take a look at the book itself.

It’s a really interesting format. There are three narrators, Mandy, the daughter of the local doctor, the aforementioned Mark Kendall and Mandy’s younger sister, Celia, a girl with learning difficulties who has trouble fitting in. There are five long sections, so we spend a lot of time with each narrator. The sections slightly overlap as well, so we see various events and people from different points of view. Celia’s view in particular is an interesting one and Devine channels the voice extremely well.

We also get to see a little of the victims as well, with each section having a short prologue which ends with them facing their deaths – note, any act of violence is never seen, indeed there seems to be a conscious decision not to describe the violence, just as in the Golden Age.

This is a very impressive book, and I haven’t mentioned yet that it’s a properly clued mystery. It’s structured sort of like a game of Guess Who?, a Venn diagram with only one person sitting in the intersection of all of the crucial aspects. And, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t looking the right way, so bonus points there too. There’s also a wonderful point where the police reveal that, in this book, they are far from idiots.

It’s not perfect – the section where the killer is made to reveal themselves seemed a little confusing as to how it worked – but that’s about it when it comes to criticism. I think we need to add Dominic/D M Devine to the list of authors who need to be reprinted. Especially as this one isn’t easy to find affordable copies of…