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Bottled Spider
 
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Bottled Spider (Hardcover)
by John Gardner (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars  (3 customer reviews)

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Product details
  • Hardcover: 384 pages
  • Publisher: Severn House Publishers Ltd (May 2002)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0727858297
  • ISBN-13: 978-0727858290
  • Product Dimensions: 20.9 x 13.5 x 3.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 499,196 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #68 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > G > Gardner, John

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  • Other Editions: Hardcover (Large Print) |  All Editions

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Product Description
Synopsis
London, 1940. As the Blitz takes grip, a young and naive policewoman is promoted beyond her abilities and experience, to work in C.I.D. She is to take the place of the men going off to war. Soon Suzie Mountford is caught up in a case of serial murder that augurs to be more sinister and more complex - and more dangerous - than anything she has bargained for.

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Customer Reviews

3 Reviews
5 star: 33%  (1)
4 star: 66%  (2)
3 star:    (0)
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Departure, 7 Jul 2002
By Frederick Marsh (Norfolk, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
John Gardner's new novel is a foray into historical detective fiction but, as one would expect with Gardner - always his own man - there is a twist; if the historical setting is only relatively recent (November - December 1940), the crime and its detection are modernistically bleak and spare. Not for Gardner the cosy Christie crimes of, say, Taken at the Flood - the Poirot story most firmly anchored in time by its references to air raids, beginning as it does in 1944 - for Gardner deliberately eschews the sanitisation of murder as practised by the classical detective story practitioners. Instead, with Bottled Spider, he gives full vent to the furies of the war years, counterpointing the indiscriminate mayhem of the Blitz with the handpicked slaughter of young women by an out of control freak.

Gardner spares no one; certainly not the heroine of the piece, who suffers more at the hands of the unhinged murderer - garrotting his victims with piano wire - than a recently promoted WDS should have to cope with. But the aforesaid WDS, Suzie - 'with a zed' - Mountford, is made of sterner stuff and her odyssey from young, pretty WPC plucked to join the Scotland Yard Reserve Squad to fulfilled woman, via air raids, harassment, personal tragedy, and the pursuit of love, is endearingly depicted by Gardner in a smooth narrative that draws the reader in from cinematic opening to tense finale.

The plot is splendidly convoluted, as one would expect, with a wide cast of sufficiently sinister suspects, and although the reader is aware of the thoroughly debased Golly Goldfinch and his penchant for piano wire from the outset, the intrigue comes from determining the identity of the man or woman behind him directing his malevolent hand. There are incidental pleasures along the way, too: the period detail is painstakingly pieced together (as one would expect of an author who