Customer Reviews

Gone Tomorrow: A Bill Slider Mystery

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In London, the Hammersmith Park attendant discovered the male adult corpse sitting on a children's swing. The police arrive on the scene led by Detective Inspector Bill Slider. The cops have little to go on, as the victim is unknown with apparently no identification on him. The discernible deathblow is a single stab wound to the heart. The killer searched the victim, but left behind a substantial amount of cash. Bill and his cohorts conclude a professional performed the hit.

With little to go on, Bill and his squad begin making inquiries in the Shepherd's Bush neighborhood. Though they make slow progress on solving the homicide, they inch closer to the truth. However, Bill realizes the clock is ticking even if additional murders had not occurred. If they do not attain a break through soon, Bill's superiors will remove him and his team from the case even though it is their turf and professional pride propels them to find the culprit.

The Bill Slider police procedurals are some of the best sub-genre novels of the past few years. The DI's latest case is exciting from the opening paradoxical imagery of a murder victim resting on an innocent children's swing until the final climax. Bill retains his wit though the investigation baffles him and his romance disconcerts him just as much. Fans of the series and any reader who enjoys a well written cleverly designed murder investigation will gain much delight with Cynthia Harrod-Eagles' GONE TOMORROW.

Harriet Klausner

A large part of the charm of this series is Bill's police team at Shephard's Bush many of whom have been with him from the very beginning. The Head has changed several times but this one despite his fractured sayings is a good egg who gives support when needed. Joanna is on the fringes (working in Amsterdam) but delivers a really good up ending for Bill ditto Atherton's own ending in this one (perhaps a bit to much coincidence here). The actual mystery is a mystery up till the very end dispite the increasing body count but the cast of miscreants are rich and vivid no matter how small a part they play. I want more.

This is my first bill slider mystery. Without having been prejudiced by other bill slider books, I enjoyed this one immensely. I agree that the ending is a bit rushed and can be improved upon. However, the dialogues are lively and witty; the characters are well-developed. (For a mystery, that is. After all, this is not supposed to be a "character piece.") What I found most amazing was how Ms. Harrod-Eagles can bring a character alive in a few paragraphs by a description of his mannerisms and his speech. I would definitely recommend this book for someone who has not read her other bill slider books.

We've had to wait close to four years for the latest (Brit) Detective Inspector Bill Slider since "Blood Sinister", so we were delighted to get hold of this hardback and catch up on Slider and love-interest and roommate Joanna; his sidekick Atherton (and his new love interest, Joanna's friend Sue); and the gang at Shepherd's Bush PD. The plot gets going in a hurry as a dead body is discovered in a park; and we're off and running despite a paucity of clues in this entertaining police procedural. It takes an awfully long time and another body or two to head the good guys to the right solution, so the reading gets a little logy at times. Meanwhile, we learn Joanna did take the orchestra job over on the continent, so her live-in relationship with Bill is pretty cold -- phone calls and an occasional visit or two per month is causing its own share of frustrations for our ever so gentle leading man.

Harrod-Eagles is a lovely writer who gets us inside the heads and hearts of our favorite characters. While they busily solve crimes, the leading characters become our friends and companions, and their relationships and affairs matter to us. Their skills at solving murders and other crimes are impressive, and generally the plots satisfy. This one is probably a tad weaker than some other entries in the series, but we do finally find out the status of Joanna and Bill, and Sue and Atherton. In all honesty, this novel will probably appeal to the author's faithful fan club; but read standalone without the previous eight as background, it would probably generate only lukewarm enthusiasm among the average reader. Hopefully now that some of the love-life stuff is resolved, maybe the zip will be back in the tenth entry to be released mid-year 2004. New readers might well just wait.

I'm generally a Bill Slider fan but the mystery in this book was rather weak. There was lots of clews but the conclusion pretty much had nothing to do with them. In fact if Slider and his crew had simply followed the most obvious path they would have got to the end much quicker. The eastern connection and the hints of exotic sexual practices and superior tailoring were nothing but distractions. Red herrings can add to the entertainment but this one had a whole shoal of them. Not to mention one death that was totally unexplained.

The original publication date was 2002 and the background does feel dated. For instance the Pub Closing Laws were changed in 2005 to allow all night drinking for those places applying for a license. I have no idea what the police now threaten publicans with when they want to lean on them.

As for Slider and Atherton's personal lives-- these were not I found particularly interesting. Joanna kept putting off having a conversation with Slider in a manner that suggested the author was trying to ratchet up the suspense. It fell a bit flat. I wished Atherton's Sue had bonked him on the head with the bottle of wine and bouquet.

There were several cameo portraits of characters from the London streets and pubs that were interesting. I particularly liked Atherton's tailor, "James Mason-- not the actor" who made a brief appearance with some useful information.

Gone Tomorrow is the ninth entry in the Bill Slider series. Slider is a police inspector in Shepherd's Bush in London, England. Overall this is a fairly solid mystery series - engaging and well written. Slider's law enforcement cohorts are well developed characters and interesting in their own right and his side-kick and off-duty buddy, Jim Atherton, makes for a good co-star. The only fault I have with this series is Slider's personal life, specifically his love life, which reads like an adolescent soap opera and which I've found predictable, repetitive, and extremely tiresome over nine books. Call me cold hearted but two or three books of romantic "cliff-hangers" is more than enough in my mind.

This book opens with the body of a small time hood found propped up in a playground swing, the victim of a surgical-like stab to the heart. Slider and his crew begin collecting clues and interviewing witnesses and friends and enemies of the deceased. The dots they connect yield a fairly large but secret criminal network. And this is where Gone Tomorrow differs somewhat from the previous books in the series, as it is a straightforward - albeit engaging - police procedural. The reader knows who the bad guys are; the story-line is the case the Shepherd's Bush police force develops against them. The earlier books are the reverse, i.e. mysteries, with the murderer's identity revealed at the conclusion.

All in all Gone Tomorrow is still a pretty good read although not as entertaining as the earlier volumes, but the good news, at least for me, is that there appears to be some resolution - finally! - in Slider's adolescent romantic life.

The base plot of __ GONE TOMORROW __ is almost generic. A group of dedicated policemen (and women) have multiple murders to solve. At first there seem to be no clues and no motives for the killings. There are no witnesses to anything, at least no witnesses who are willing to talk to the police. Anyone who might know anything seems to be frightened almost "out of his or her wits." As is often the case in Police Fiction, the higher-ups who are politically motivated but who have no actual experience in investigative work, are putting pressure on our hard working heroes to solve the murders yesterday for publicity purposes.

This, then, is the background for this latest Bill Slider mystery. Into the plot mentioned above are thrown the first murder victim, who is discovered, stabbed, sitting upright on a children's swing in a park, without any identification; a couple of later murder victims; Detective Inspector Slider, and his domestic problems; Detective Atherton, and his domestic problems; Slider's boss whose wife has just died; and an assortment of witnesseses, victims, and good and bad guys, who sometimes are not so good or not so bad; and, oh yes, an oddball witness or two such as a blind man and his retarded adult son.

What I think that Cynthia Harrod-Eagles (the author) does so well is to show how a group of police investigators, working as a team, and following up each lead, no matter how minor, doing repetitive, fatiguing legwork, can make a case out of seeming bits and pieces of nothing. She also makes almost all of her main characters come to life, and gives them lives and problems of their own, outside of the main plot.

I was also fascinated by the sense of humor she showed in her chapter titles, each one a masterful pun. Following are a few of my favorites:

"Opening the Male"

"The Eyes Have It"

"From Err to Paternity"

"Bra-Tangled Spanner"

And, my personal absolute favorite: "Bet Your Bottom Deux Lards"

To find out how well each of these and ten or so more chapter titles fit into the content of their respective chapters, I guess that you'll just have to read __ GONE TOMORROW __ yourself.

I love Ms. Harrod-Eagles' Bill Slider. He is one of my favourite Police Detectives out there right now. He's smart, funny and has a droll sense of humour, and he's a genuinely nice guy. But I was disappointed with this book. It was somewhat disjointed and had a loose plot. The reader figures out who the bad guy is practically right away and it's a matter of reading to find out how they manage to get him. And even there we are thwarted because the ending is rushed and we don't actually get the satisfaction of seeing the bad guy nailed with the evidence. Ms. Harrod-Eagles' dry wit and her puns are still excellent though, and I will continue to read this series.

This is the eight Bill Slider mystery that I have read. I have enjoyed all previous seven books, but this one I found utterly confusing and worse, utterly boring. I found myself not only starting to skim the pages, but actually flipping pages. There were too many characters to keep track of, let alone care about. Harrod-Eagles fared better with her series characters: Slider, Joanna, Atherton, and Sue. They had some relationship issues that were interesting, but since this is a mystery book, I would expect the mystery part to be better than the relationship part.
Only die hard Slider fans should read this one.

Although not a complete washout, a disjointed narrative and an unsatisfying ending makes this one of the weakest entries in the DI Bill Slider series. Ironically, Slider and his fellow officers are often lamenting the lack of hard evidence to assist their inquiries. Perhaps Harrod-Eagles is telling us that she didn't adequately plot the story. In any event this entry may indicate that this series has run its course and that the author is ready to move on to a new police procedural. Unless you have read all previous entries in this series, I strongly recommend that you not waste your time on this inferior entry.