A Meeting of Minds

Superintendent Mike Yeadings' sergeant, Rosemary Zyczynski, (call her "Z") had a psychic itch about her landlady's celebration dinner. "Did you get a feeling," she asks her lover, Max, "that there's more going on under this roof than readily meets the eye?" Rosemary couldn't have been righter. The dinner was in honor of the new house - a large, once private mansion that had been through numerous changes of face throughout the years. Now Z's landlady had bought it to replace her original dingy building, and Rosemary had moved with her from the old to the new. The partry was to welcome the tenants of the several new apartments that had been made in the new house. Z's uneasiness about her fellow tenants was quickly forgotten; she had more pressing problems of her own. Yeadings was about to choose either Rosemary or Beaumont, his other sergeant, to promote to inspector, and the unavoidable subsurface rivalry between the two very different police detectives had raised a barrier that hindered them in their work. The work they did have came close to Rosemary herself and startled her into remembering her words to Max. The body of one of the tenants, a single woman who had moved in with her mother, was found brutally murdered, and the case naturally was Yeadings' responsibility and thus that of Rosemary and Beaumont. Curzon uncannily keeps on bringing her readers believable characters, both the stalwart Yeadings and his Woman Friday, Z, as well as whole groups of once-a-book individuals who set a reader right smack in the middle of the little English town and the puzzling and intriguing crime that can be found there.