It’s 1981 in Richmond, south-west London. Detective Inspector Henry Hobbes is called out to a rundown house where the octogenarian Leonard Graves has killed himself. There’s vodka, pills, a cut on his arm and a note in his pocket to a woman called Adeline. But who is she? Searching the house, Hobbes and his sergeant, Meg Latimer, discover dozens of identical dresses, each one cut open at the stomach, the gash lined with blood. Despite Hobbes’s sense that something terrible has happened among the faded theatrical memorabilia and musty rooms, it’s not immediately clear what it might be. Then Graves’s son is brutally murdered in Richmond Park, and the case begins to take grip.
House with No Doors is Jeff Noon’s second crime outing, the sequel to 2019’s Slow Motion Ghosts. The prolific novelist and short story writer, who made his name in the 1990s with his avant-garde sci-fi books, has arrived at the genre with some assurance.
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