Bleeding heart yard by Elly Griffiths

Harbinder Kaur, first introduced in The Stranger diaries, winner of the  2020 Edgar Award for Best Novel, returns in another riveting story. She has been newly appointed as Detective Inspector and transferred to London. She is faced with a big case – a well-known climate change denying Conservative MP, Garfield Rice has been found murdered during a school reunion. Amongst the former students attending the reunion are Cassie Fitzgerald, now a police officer, who is hiding a deadly secret, Anna a foreign language teacher who has returned from Italy to look after her ill mother, a famous actress, a rock star, and another politician. As Kaur begins her investigation, it becomes increasingly clear that there is a link to a death of another student in their final school year – a young man who fell to his death from a train platform. Then another murder is committed, this time in Bleeding Heart Yard.

The story is told in three voices, that of Cassie, Anna, and Kaur, and all bring different insights into the narrative. Cassie believes that she and her friends killed their fellow classmate and has tried to hide this from her memory. She is convinced that one of her classmates could be the murderer of Garfield Rice and the reader becomes very involved in her feelings and memories of the past. Anna has different memories and has lived abroad but finds that returning to London brings back feelings long buried. Kaur must sift through all the evidence, relying on her instincts  whie beginning to trust her fellow detectives.

It is easy to picture the London that Griffiths describes. In her afterword she says that Bleeding Heart Yard is a real place, as are the streets that Kaur’s flatmate Mette travelled along. The private school that Cassie and her classmates attended is also vividly described.

This was a well written, engrossing story, with an ending that I did not expect. This series is likely to prove as popular with readers as the Ruth Galloway series.

Themes: Murder, Detectives, London.

Pat Pledger