Ricochet

Jack Stryker #3

by Paula Gosling

When Professor Mayhew is murdered in her own home, Jack Stryker's team believe they are investigating a straightforward case of domestic homicide. Jack, however, has his doubts, though he isn't sure whether his uncertain frame of mind is due to the case or the fact that his relationship with Kate Trevorne is going through a rocky patch. Kate, meanwhile, has been receiving a series of unpleasant and anonymous phone calls at her department in the university. Too proud and stubborn to ask Jack for professional help, she decides to trace the caller herself. Then a student of the dead professor is murdered in an unsavoury part of town while he was working his shift as porter in the hospital's emergency department. It could have been a mugging which went too far, except that a few hours beforehand he had called the police station and spoken to Jack in some distress. What possible motive could link the two killings, and is Kate's refusal to tell Jack about the phone calls preventing him from knowing all the facts? Another blissfully serpentine mystery from the mistress of the genre.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Paula Gosling is a US born crime writer. She has lived in the UK since the 1960s. Gosling started her writing career as a copy-writer and published her first novel, A Running Duck, in 1974. This won the John Creasey Award for the best first novel of the year and she has also received both the Gold Dagger for Monkey Puzzle in 1985. She is a past Chairman of the Crime Writers' Association.

Her novel A Running Duck, written in 1974 (also published as Fair Game), has been adapted twice into films, once as a Sylvester Stallone vehicle - Cobra and the second time as a film with Cindy Crawford entitled Fair Game.

Reviews

[JenniferB]

Not her best but still well written. Based on goings on a university research department