The Girl in the Gallery re-unites the reader with protagonist Beth Haldane. I love this character. She is intelligent, inquisitive and credible and her almost romance with DI York is delightful.

In this novel, Beth visits her local art gallery and finds a comatose teenage girl positioned on top of a sarcophagus. Beth takes charge of the situation when the museum assistant proves to be completely hapless. This is how she falls into investigating the case with York. The author juggles Beth’s involvment in the case with her own job at Wyatt’s College and the demands of being a single mother, bringing up her little boy. I do not want to give any spoilers, suffice to say the plot is clever, and maintains the well-paced and interesting mystery throughout. I read a great many murder mysteries, but I did not guess ‘who dunnit’ in this case.

If anything, I enjoyed The Girl in the Gallery even more that Death in Dulwich and will definitely look out for more books by this author. The Girl in the Gallery would be an excellent book club read. Alice Castle writes fine mysteries and I highly recommend this book.

Alice Castle lives in South London with her two children, two stepchildren, two cats and her husband. She was a feature writer on the Daily Express for many years and has written for most other national newspapers. She has a degree in Modern History from St Andrews University, is the British Royalty expert for Flemish TV, and lived in Brussels for eight years. Her first novel, Hot Chocolate, sold out in two weeks and her second, Death in Dulwich, was published in September 2017 as the first in the London Murder Mystery Series.

Val Penny