The husband-and-wife team that is Nicci French wrote 12 standalone psychological thrillers before switching to a series with last year’s Blue Monday. Their central character, Frieda Klein, a psychotherapist who moonlights as a quasi-detective, returns in Tuesday’s Gone, together with a number of other characters, including the melancholy DCI Malcolm Karlsson and his team.
The book begins promisingly with a Deptford social worker visiting a middle-aged woman with dementia, only to find that her client is serving tea and iced buns to a naked man sitting on her sofa. To make matters more piquant, the man is a rotting, fly-ridden corpse with a missing finger. As always, French excels at such opening situations, bringing to them a touch of the macabre and the shock of the unexpected.
Frieda has unfinished business carried over from Blue Monday.
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