Star Fall

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Narrated by Terry Wale

Overview

Antiques expert Rowland Egerton, the darling of daytime TV, has been stabbed to death in his luxurious West London home. The press are going to be all over this one like a nasty rash: the pressure's on Slider for a result, and soon. Egerton's partner, the bulky, granite-faced John Lavender, found the body; did he also do the deed? Or was it a burglary gone wrong? A missing Faberge box and Impressionist painting point that way. But as Slider and his team investigate, none of the facts seem to fit. And it soon becomes clear that the much-loved, charming Mr Egerton wasn't as universally loved, or perhaps as charming, as Slider was first led to believe...

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 01/05/2015
A celebrity murder preoccupies Det. Insp. Bill Slider in Harrod-Eagles’s excellent 17th mystery featuring the London policeman (after 2013’s Hard Going). Who could have fatally stabbed Rowland Egerton, the popular star of the TV show Antiques Galore!, in his beautiful early Victorian home? Suspicion falls on his longtime friend and business partner, John Lavender, but the more Slider and his team learn about Egerton, the slimier he becomes. Personal details balance the police proceedings: Slider’s wife, Joanne, is recovering from a miscarriage. The couple’s tentative steps toward easing their grief and putting their relationship back on an even keel ring true. Clear, direct prose offers the occasional unexpected phrase: “The traffic lights, all green, were round alien eyes watching him”; a good-looking man has an “enviable head of hair, sculpted by the same firm that designed the Sydney Opera House.” This well-done tale should earn the author new fans. (Mar.)

Booklist Starred Review

Laughaloud levity that’s pure genius. Highly recommended

Library Journal

03/01/2015
In this 17th series installment (after Hard Going), DI Bill Slider is savoring the post-Christmas quiet in his London police station, until a call comes in, alerting the team to the murder of famed daytime TV personality Rowland Egerton. The immediate suspect is his business partner, but Slider soon discovers that Egerton had many more enemies than friends.

Kirkus Reviews

2014-12-16
DI Bill Slider asks why the thief who killed West London television personality Rowland Egerton in his home ignored his wallet and most of his treasures and made off with exactly two items.Egerton, it turns out, didn't know nearly as much about antiques as you'd think from watching Going, Going, Gone and Antiques Galore! His gift for charming people enough to sell them anything made him a perfect complement to John Lavender, his wooden, knowledgeable partner in the Fulham Road shop whose operations Egerton's success on the telly largely subsidized. Now the partnership has been severed by a letter opener snatched from Egerton's table. His alert cleaner, Molly Bean, notices two absences from his extensive collection of antiquities: a Fabergé malachite box and a Berthe Morisot painting. Neither of the missing pieces is valueless, of course, but Egerton's killer passed up many more valuable items to take them. Was it Dale Sholto, the daughter Egerton abandoned on his way to the top? Rupert Melling, the equally charming antiquities expert he quarreled with publicly? Felicity Marsh, the television presenter whom rumor linked him to romantically? Philip Masterson, the former Minister for the Arts, whose wife, Antiques Galore! expert Julia "Bunny" Rabbet, died of a brain hemorrhage a month ago? Or was it one of the blackmail victims Egerton, nee Phil Harris, delighted in collecting from and tormenting?Though the answers aren't nearly as interesting as the questions themselves, Harrod-Eagles (Hard Going, 2014, etc.) is never less than expert in presenting suspects, combing through the evidence, varying the tone and showing new ways that Egerton was even more of a bounder than you suspected.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173419484
Publisher:	Soundings, Limited
Publication date:	10/01/2016
Series:	Bill Slider Series , #17
Edition description:	Unabridged

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