Dark Mirror by Barry Maitland

 

It's a typical day in the sedate Reading Room of the London Library.  But the calm is shattered when a young graduate student, Marion Summers, experiences a seizure and dies.  What could have caused a young healthy woman to die so dramatically?  The medical examiner is able to provide the answer; arsenic poisoning.

Marion was working on a thesis about the art world and the use of poisons in the paints and in the lives of the artists and their wives and lovers.  The academic who is supervising her work disagrees with her ideas and they are in conflict.  Can he be the one who poisoned her?  Marion comes from a poor background but lives in a luxurious apartment.  How did she finance that?  Her stepfather is also a suspect as he has a record of violence.  

Detective Inspector Kathy Kolla has been recently promoted and wants to successfully solve this case.  But when one of the suspects with connections reports her for harassing behavior, the case is given to her supervisor, DCI David Brock.  Kathy continues to run down leads in the case, sure that she is getting close to the answer.  As more women start to die from the same arsenic poisoning, can she or Brock get the answers before the killer strikes again?

This is the tenth novel in the Kolla and Brock series.  Long-time readers of the series will be interested in this latest case and in Kolla's professional rise.  Readers will learn about the pre-Raphaelite period of art and all the scandals in that sector, as well as gaining knowledge about poisoning cases.  This book is recommended for mystery readers.