Death Drop

by B.M. Gill

When twelve-year-old David Fleming dies in what looks like an accident, his father goes to his school seeking an explanation, only to receive the cold shoulder. As he looks deeper he discovers it was murder, but why would anyone want to kill a twelve-year-old? - The Mystery Lover's Companion, Art Bourgeau

Genres: Mystery

248 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Barbara Margaret Trimble aka Margaret Blake

Reviews

[Ben Kindall · Rating 3 out of 5]

B.M. Gill does well in this book, what B.M. Gill has done well in the other three books I’ve read by her. She is great at creating a fluent story, while allowing the reader to know characters’ inner thoughts, while dialogue is going on. Her humor and descriptive imagery work well here. That leaves my problem with this book to be the story. It’s called a mystery, but there is no mystery. It’s obvious who the killer is from the first time we meet them. It felt more like reading a soap opera rather than a murder mystery. It wasn’t a bad read, I enjoyed the ending and was left feeling satisfied.

Spoilers
It’s wild that the dad just starts banging his dead son’s school nurse, TWO days after his death. And that ending, the father and his son’s killer literally box it out in the schools gym, until the killer is left bleeding and the father can’t justify killing him. Just some wild storylines, but an entertaining read.

[Rosa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting to read this shortly after watching if.... and seeing how things had changed eleven years later. Answer: not much.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book about bullying in boarding schools for young boys in England -- hate bullies so this was a
slog to read.

[Romulus · Rating 1 out of 5]

Death Drop is unbelievably, staggeringly bad. The style is flat and plodding, interspersed with odd metaphors and similes that don’t quite fit. (‘The smile...needled him like a poisoned dart...’) This is meant to be a novel of suspense but suspense there is nowhere to be found. The characters are poorly delineated and not the least bit interesting. The dialogue is dull and wooden. The killer is indicated early. The rather protracted confrontation between the killer and the victim’s father takes place at the very end of the novel only manages to be extremely annoying and thoroughly unconvincing. We are treated to a sexual encounter thus, ‘She had slept with other men, but it had meant nothing. This time, in an aura of rage and pain, her initiation into a full awakening had been superb.’ And another female character, a solicitor named Thyrza, believes a man attending the inquest is ‘divesting her’. She means undressing her with his eyes. A PE teacher exposed as having had an affair with his 15 year old (male) student simply packs up and goes. Things were clearly different back in 1979, when this wretched novel was published.

[Margaret]

My book has a different cover.

A nice British mystery about the death of a boy at a boarding school. I thought the character of the father, called by his surname Fleming, was well done in the gamut of emotions he experienced. Curiously, in this book, there is a lack of British expressions or slang (I guess they really spoke proper English at the school) and no police figure in the story at all. Nice to read a mystery that was a bit different in flavor from the amateur detective heroines or professional police detectives. :)

[JEAN O'DONNELL · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quick read.

[Jack Heath]

Synopsis: twelve-year-old David Fleming has died at boarding school and his father is getting the run-around. Why? Was it murder?