The Dungeon House

July 20, 2015
At the start of Edwards’s engrossing seventh Lake District mystery (after 2013’s The Frozen Shroud), Malcolm Whiteley, the proprietor of the majestic Dungeon House, is depressed over business problems and enraged at his wife Lysette’s infidelities and her request for a divorce. Following the annual barbecue for family and friends, a drunken Whiteley realizes that he can use his Winchester rifle to resolve these issues. Flash forward 20 years to the present. Det. Chief Insp. Hannah Scarlett’s Cumbria police team is working on the case of Lily Wellstone, a teenage girl who disappeared three years earlier. Lily’s father was Whiteley’s accountant. Coincidence strikes again when the daughter of Nigel Whiteley, Malcolm’s nephew and the Dungeon House’s current occupant, goes missing. Edwards has a way of tangling lives and spinning a cloud of suspicion over several characters, sending readers up and down wonderfully entertaining blind alleys that keep interest high until the unexpected, though slightly anticlimactic, end.

July 1, 2015

DCI Hannah Scarlett plays a much larger role in this seventh series entry (after Frozen Shroud) than historian Daniel Kind, and this results in a plot that is more procedural and less historical than previous titles. Hannah, who heads up a cold-case team, is investigating a missing-persons case from three years ago, when two more women disappear. Ties to a decades-old love-triangle murder surface, seeming to bind the three investigations and encouraging Hannah to revisit the earlier murder. Her relationship with Daniel simmers in the background as she decides whether to move into her own home and out of Daniel's. Set against the atmospheric backdrop of the remote Cumbrian coast, Edwards's twisted story of greed and obsession is peopled with a wide variety of damaged characters, furthering interest. Much of the plot is revealed through interviews and conversations, giving a slightly subdued tone to even the most harrowing events depicted. VERDICT Fans of Reginald Hill's mysteries will enjoy this riveting combination of history and contemporary mystery.--Sharon Mensing, Emerald Mountain Sch., Steamboat Springs, CO

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2015
Dungeon House, on the remote western coast of Cumbria, is a grand mansion, home to Malcolm Whiteley and his family. Malcolm has unfortunately fallen on hard times, thanks to some business reversals. His drinking is out of control, and he is sure that his lovely wife, Lysette, is having an affair, despite her denials. When Malcolm's annual party for the neighbors turns into a disaster, Lysette has had enough and tells Malcolm she's leaving. He grabs his trusty Winchester rifle and shoots her and himself. Their daughter, Amber, turns up dead in a ditch in the garden.Twenty years later, Hannah Scarlett, head of the cold-case team, is investigating the disappearance of Lily Elstone, a local teen whose father was once Malcolm's accountant. Another teenage girl, Shona Whiteley, the daughter of Malcolm's nephew, who now lives in Dungeon House, also vanishes. The connection between these cases reveals a complex network of family dysfunction and deceit. Readers who enjoy British procedurals will find this multidimensional, multigenerational case very satisfying.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

July 15, 2015
In his seventh Lake District mystery (The Frozen Shroud, 2013, etc.), Edwards shows that a troubled local family can rename the Dungeon House as Ravenglass Knoll, but they can't erase its violent past or prevent a recurrence of the same fatal passions. Twenty years ago, Malcolm Whiteley, who ran a highly questionable waste management firm, had questions of his own about Lysette, the first love he'd married. So convinced was Malcolm that Lysette was betraying him with someone-maybe Gray Elstone, Malcolm's accountant; maybe Robbie Dean, the former football player who'd killed his girlfriend, Carrie North, in a careless car accident; maybe Scott Durham, the neighbor who was giving her painting lessons; maybe Nigel Whiteley, the son of Malcolm's estranged, cancer-stricken brother Ted, a boy reputed to fancy older women-that it was practically certain he'd kill one of them sooner or later. Instead, according to the evidence, he shot Lysette, then chased after their beloved daughter, Amber, and threw her off a cliff, and finally stuck the gun in his own mouth. Finis-until DCI Hannah Scarlett, of Cumbria's Cold Case Review Team, is asked to look once more into the case at the very moment that Joanna Footit, a former girlfriend of Nigel's who was seriously traumatized in the same accident that killed Carrie North and crippled Robbie Dean, decides that it would be a perfect time to return to Dungeon House, Malcolm's home, which Nigel has inherited and christened Ravenglass Knoll, and look up her old friends and neighbors. Let's just say that Hannah's labors are crowned with greater success than Joanna's. Despite the gap of all those years, Edwards works exceptionally close to his characters. So every complication he piles on so generously comes with a fresh sting, even if many readers will be left more bemused than challenged by this intricate puzzler.

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