High Rise Mystery

I welcome a murder mystery set in an urban tower block that has two sisters as its underage sleuths. When Norva and Niki find antique dealer Hugo dead in a skip, they set out in the usual way to solve the mystery of who-dun-it. They seek to establish time of death, to work out a series of pertinent questions to ask the limited range of suspects, and to gradually discover who might be the killer. Of course, in precisely the way of Midsummer Murders or Death in Paradise, the whole business turns out to be much more complicated than they could have imagined. It’s complicated, too, by the fact that their dad, the on-site manager of the tower block, is the prime suspect. There’s a touch of realism in the idea that it’s not police ineptitude or stupidity that puts them so far behind the girls in solving the case, just simply that the police don’t have the necessary number of officers to devote to it. It’s written in a pared down punchy style, with touches of humour and street dialogue and some nice to and fro between the girls. However, I found it difficult to work my way through the twists and turns of the plot, and this unravelling isn’t helped by the way in which the sisters’ documentation of their enquiries is set out by the publishers in tables of small faint print. At over 350 pages, despite the short chapters, I found it rather too long.