The Stratford Murder

Mike Hollow

Having read it

★★★★★

A surprisingly good and steady mystery that was very readable. It’s set in wartime London, specifically East Ham, with plenty of intriguing characters (and a few ne’er-do-wells!) all with believable backstories to give context and meaning to motives and decisions made.

After considered thought, something to eat, certainly for DI Jago’s colleague, DC Cradock, a bit of sleuthing and investigation, the crimes gets solved!

A good passage

Jago heard his own words as though they were spoken by someone else, but in his stomach he felt something like a shard of ice biting into him. It was a deep, cold anger at the death of this woman Amy Evans. Whether it was directed at the man who’d dropped the bomb from the sky, the dictator who’d commanded the action, the God who’d allowed it to happen, or the universe for being a place where such things occurred, he couldn’t tell. All he knew was the intense disgust that gripped him, the sense of futility that he’d known as a young man in the trenches. He wanted to scream his rage, but he remained outwardly silent, emotionless. He was certain of only one thing. The law must take its course in respect of Hosea Evans, but the real crime was not a weak man’s theft of a dead woman’s ring. It was the pointless killing of a frightened woman who wanted to stay by her husband.