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Stiff News takes Inspector Sloan and Crosby into the Berebury district's long-running retirement home, where an elderly resident has died apparently of natural causes and a letter from her solicitor has arrived in the next morning's post suggesting otherwise. The investigation widens into the home's residents, staff, and inheritance battles in a way that is classic Catherine Aird.
The pleasures here are quiet. Aird writes the retirement-home setting with the kind of unsparing observation that more sentimental writers would not allow, and the residents' politics (the slights, the wills, the rivalries) are treated as the serious business they are. The murder itself is solved fairly, with a clue Aird plants in chapter three that almost no one will catch on first reading.
Four stars. One of the stronger late-period Sloan novels. Recommended after the better-known earlier books.
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