The Shadow of Memory

by Connie Berry

Published by Crooked Lane Books

Cover design by Alan Ayers

Author, Connie Berry, has created a singularly unique classic murder mystery series. The Shadow of Memory, the fourth Kate Hamilton mystery is a carefully crafted brainteaser.

Kate, an American antiques dealer with a proclivity for solving mysteries, has a lot on her mind. She and fiancé, Tom Mallory, are wrestling with a few life altering decisions. Not the least of which is where they will live after they are married; the UK where Tom is employed as a Detective Inspector or the U.S. where Kate has an antiques business. Whist she ponders her wedding plans she helps, Ivor Tweedy, dealer in fine antiques and antiquities, keep his struggling shop, The Cabinet of Curiosities, open.

Ivor has been asked to provide preliminary appraisals in preparation for an upcoming auction for an enigmatic client, Netherfield Sanatorium. Kate is troubled by an instinctive niggling that something is not right and a foreboding of treachery and danger when she examines the preeminent piece, a rare fifteenth century Dutch masterpiece.

The plot thickens when Kate discovers a body in a graveyard. ‘Nothing unusual about that; isn’t that where bodies should be?’ you ask incredulously. Yes, but not just lying above ground, slumped against a tomb stone. Beside him a slip of paper with the address of Vivian Bunn, the lady with whom Kate is staying. It is later ascertained that the body is that of, William Parker, a retired CID, and Vivian’s first boyfriend. Why was he on his way to see Vivian? Was it to renew an old love or warn her?

I highly recommend this cleverly contrived conundrum, building suspense and layers of complex clues, and ending with a satisfying plot twist.