Gone to Ground Book

When police detective Will Grayson and his partner, Helen Walker, investigate the violent death of Stephen Bryan, a gay academic, their first thoughts are of an ill-judged sexual encounter or a fatal lovers’ quarrel: The man’s face was like a glove that had been pulled inside out. But after they notice Bryan’s computer is missing, their focus soon widens. Could the attack be connected to the book Bryan was writing about the life and mysterious death of fifties film star Stella Leonard?

Convinced that Bryan had discovered a shocking truth about Leonard’s rich and influential family, his sister Lesley throws herself into her own amateur investigation. But as Grayson and Walker delve into the past and the circumstances of Bryan’s death, they find a vortex of lust, power, and wealth in which nothing is straightforward—and no one is safe.

On the heels of his acclaimed Frank Elder series, John Harvey delivers a page-turner both subtle and devastating.

Publishers Weekly

Acclaimed British author Harvey takes a break from his popular Charlie Resnick series (Lonely Hearts, etc.) with this well-written but unexciting police procedural. Stephen Bryan, a gay academic specializing in film studies, has been bludgeoned to death in his shower. Cambridge Det. Insp. Will Grayson and Det. Sgt. Helen Walker soon focus on Bryan's spurned lover, Mark McKusick, but the theft of one of Bryan's manuscripts, which deals with a 1950s film star whose great-niece is now one of the bad girls of British cinema, leads the detectives to wonder whether the professor's digging into the past led to his murder. While the solution is anticlimactic and the excerpts from a fictional screenplay add little to the plot or atmosphere, Grayson and Walker emerge as fully developed characters whose choice of career has taken its toll on their health and family lives. (Feb.)

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