This Mortal Coil [Hardcover]

Anne Quinton (Author), Ann Quinton (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In an English city, a contract killer leaves a business card from the "Coil Shuffler" on his victims, apparently trawling for new clients. Rachel Morland, a physiotherapist and vicar in training, brings detectives Michael Croft and Nick Holroyd a clue to the Shuffler's identity--and becomes a target herself. Veteran genre author Quinton introduces Croft and Holroyd in this satisfying police procedural with a fiendishly tough mystery, vivid characters, and evocative English atmosphere. Former librarian Quinton tackles a wealth of topics in the course of the story: friendship, medieval architecture, euthanasia, modern religion, and the importance of reputation to both good guys and bad. Fans of Inspector Morse and other more well known British coppers would be wise to make the acquaintance of Croft and Holyrod, who are more than capable of holding their own with the big boys. John Rowen

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Severn House Publishers (August 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0727853554
• ISBN-13: 978-0727853554
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,497,627 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Ambitious, but not quite there, January 20, 2002

By 

Shelley Mckibbon (Halifax, NS) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: This Mortal Coil (Hardcover)

This is a semi-dark mystery filled with characters and action, lost love, broken hearts, and violent death. Because there are so many characters, none of them really stepped up and made an impression on me -- the novel would have had to be twice as long to give them room to become people. I found a lot of the dialogue overwrought, like something out of a B-movie, and not in that fun way. And the situations, especially the ones involving the two police officers who used to be partners, felt like retreads from stories I've read once too often. Again, given the space, the writer might have made these characters worth getting to know, but as it was she had to tell us too much, and show us too little.

I am usually pretty dumb about guessing "whodunnit," but I had the solution about four chapters into this one. At first I thought parts of my solution were so obvious that they had to be red herrings... but they weren't. It says nothing good about the story that I decided to flip to the end and check my guess. At which point, because I couldn't see any good reason to keep reading, I stopped about halfway through.

Given characters who breathed a little, instead of sitting there on the paper, and a plot that was more clearly a thriller rather than a cozy -- this one nbever really decided which it was -- this might have been a pretty good mystery. As it was, neither fish nor fowl, it just didn't hold my interest.