Amendment of Life: A Mystery

I thought this book was literally 'made or written for me' since I work in a bioethics/disability group that deals with some of the more recent moral conundrums brought to the fore by biomedical practitioners. Usually we have a problem in that families want to euthanize their family member with a disability. It never occurred to me that DNA testing could show that one parent is not actually the parent of a disabled child! And then to have invasive surgery to keep from passing on the defective gene to more posterity...I really think the woman should have mentioned this before the 'father' had the surgery. Would have avoided all kinds of trouble... I was in London about 20 years ago, and though I saw one of their famous mazes I never got the opportunity to lose myself in one of them. I would have liked that as a child, though I imagine it can get a bit claustrophobic. Poor Inspector Sloan seems to have a knack for having to deal with bored elderly in Britain...their boredom is usually relieved by sticking their noses where into his murder cases. Though in this case the woman could hardly avoid getting involved since it was her maze the woman was killed in, and she had a bird's eye view of the maze from the second story of her home. She is actually quite witty, and keeps Sloan on his toes trying to figure out how to get through the maze, and how the body of the young woman got into the maze with no obvious tracks or means of doing so. Sloan continues to have to deal with his rather dense Constable who has a penchant for speed. And in the midst of all this is a small boy suffering from a genetic disorder, who in the end is left bearing all the suffering that the selfishness of the adults around him left him with. A truly sad possibility to our endeavors to learn more about our existence and the sciences involved in making us who we are. Karen Sadler

Catherine Aird's longevity in the mystery writing genre is explained by this book. She's been writing her CD Sloan mysteries for years, and in this, her most recent addition to the series, she still has all her skills intact. She write mysteries that intelligent, erudite and slyly funny. In this one a body of a woman is found dead in front of a statue right smack in the middle of a maze. Sloan and Crosby first have to determine whether she died by her own hand or did someone else speed her to her death? Then they have to figure out how she could have been brought into the middle of this very difficult maze. And how do a dead rabbit and a missing goat from quite a few mile away tie in with their mystery? I am a huge fan of Catherine Aird, and this book is as elegant and mischievious as any of the the preceeding books in her Sloan/Crosby series.