Swimming with the Dead

August 12, 2013
The occult collides with police procedure in Guttridge’s fragmented, patchwork fourth Brighton mystery (after 2011’s The Thing Itself). A huge wicker man is burning on the Brighton seaside. Performance art? Unfortunately no. There’s a body within the wicker frame, and Sarah Gilchrist, newly promoted to acting detective inspector, teams with young but highly knowledgeable Constable Bellamy Heap to find whodunit. Heap’s bottomless knowledge of pagan arcana comes into continual use as more perplexing events hit the town: a vicar has disappeared, his flat vandalized with a pentagram; a painting called The Devil’s Altar is stolen from the Brighton Museum; and satanic books are missing from the library. Routine questioning of eccentric locals finds a rich vein of New Age spirituality mixed with black magic. Meanwhile, former Chief Insp. Bob Watts begins a parallel investigation on his own and learns more about Templars, Walpurgisnacht, and toxic plants than he or the reader really wants to know.

June 3, 2019
Guttridge’s sprightly sixth Brighton mystery (after 2014’s Those Who Feel Nothing) finds Det. Insp. Sarah Gilchrist ruefully contemplating her “late-onset promiscuity” when she gets a call from Det. Sgt. Bellamy Heap to join him at a crime scene. Roland Gulliver, a certified Channel swimmer, has been stabbed to death in front of the wonderfully exuberant Art Deco frontage of Brighton’s Salthaven Lido. On further examination, it becomes clear that Gulliver was partially drowned before being savagely attacked. Another swimmer dies during a six-hour qualifying heat for swimming the Channel. An autopsy reveals that the death was no accident. After a third swimmer dies, Gilchrist and Heap start searching for connections. Are the deaths somehow related to a campaign to save the Salthaven Lido from developers? Amusing repartee, well-drawn characters, and intriguing plot twists distinguish this police procedural. Readers interested in the complicated preparation and training needed for a Channel swim will be rewarded. Agent: Paul Moreton, Bell Lomax Moreton Agency (U.K.).

June 15, 2019
Brighton Police Commissioner Bob Watts, usually above the fray, can't resist the lure of a complicated case. Watts' former lover DI Sarah Gilchrist (Those Who Feel Nothing, 2014, etc.) is far from satisfied with her current diet of one-night stands. As she ponders her problems, a call from her erudite detective sergeant, Bellamy Heap, plunges her and Watts into a twisty murder case. A man has been found stabbed outside the Salthaven Lido, which is the center of a battle between developer Alice Sutherland and those trying to save the Art Deco building. Pathologist Frank Bilson identifies the man as Roland Gulliver, a gay man with whom he sometimes swam. An autopsy shows that Gulliver drowned before he was stabbed and his body was moved. Gulliver once swam the English Channel, and Heap's girlfriend, radio reporter Kate Simpson, is in training to do so--as is Bob Watts. Gulliver was working on the Save the Lido campaign, but committee chair April Medavoy can't imagine that his involvement provides a motive for murder, and there's always the possibility of a hate crime. Watts and Kate are in a practice race in the Lake District run by Dolphin Smile's Derek Neill when one of the swimmers dies, ostensibly of a heart attack. In another qualifier for a Channel swim, wealthy Christine Bromley also drowns. Both deaths turn out to be anything but accidents. Picking up some hints from Watts and Sarah, who are deeply involved in the long-distance swimming scene, the police chase clues as far away as Thailand. Seemingly unrelated people and events turn out to have unexpected connections that provide most of the answers. Cleverly nuanced sleuths solve a series of knotty crimes with daring and panache.

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