Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
Catherine Aird has been writing the Inspector Sloan novels for so long that they have become a comfortable habit, and A Going Concern is exactly the kind of comfortable habit she does well. An elderly Calleshire matriarch dies, her executor finds her instructions a little too specific to be casual, and Sloan and Crosby spend a few hundred pages working out who in the family had reasons.
The pleasures of this series are not in shock and not in pace. They are in the small social observations, the cleanliness of the procedural beats, and the long-running joke of Detective Constable Crosby being incurably literal in conversation with his more cerebral inspector. The murder lands fairly. The motive is the kind of thing only a paying-attention reader will catch.
Three stars. Cozy procedural at a high level of polish. A nice evening with a cup of tea.
Related reads
If you liked A Going Concern
A Most Contagious Game
by Catherine Aird
Catherine Aird's 1967 standalone, written between her first two Sloan novels. Quieter, sharper, and a small early-career marvel.
Injury Time
by Catherine Aird
A mid-period Inspector Sloan. Catherine Aird at her most procedural and her most quietly observant.
Stiff News
by Catherine Aird
The 17th Sloan procedural. A retirement-home death that may not be natural. Catherine Aird at her most institutional and her most quietly biting.
Amendment of Life
by Catherine Aird
The 19th Inspector Sloan. A body in a country church maze and Catherine Aird in her purest form.
After Effects
by Catherine Aird
Inspector Sloan investigating a pharmaceutical company's drug-trial gone wrong. Aird writing institutional procedural.
Little Knell
by Catherine Aird
The 18th Inspector Sloan. A piece of garden statuary, a missing mother, and Catherine Aird at her most procedural.
More by this author