Picking up where her debut, The Other Half, left off, Charlotte Vassell's The In Crowd marks the second outing for Metropolitan Police Detective Inspector Caius Beauchamp, who's a different sort of investigator: a tenderhearted, biracial, working-class bloke with a politics degree. This time around, Vassell delivers an amusing and substantive rom-com-flavored mystery as Beauchamp, stood up by his Tinder date, meets an alluring woman at a fringe theatrical production where a man sitting in their row unceremoniously dies.
The theatergoer's death sparks an inquiry into the 2004 disappearance of a 14-year-old from a girls' boarding school, but that's not the only cold case Beauchamp and his team warm up. The discovery of a woman's body in the Thames relaunches an investigation into the whereabouts of the man who seemed to be behind a decades-earlier multimillion-pound pension scheme. And, yes, the two cases have something--specifically someone--in common.
Apparently cognizant that restricting her point of view to just one of her charismatic characters would be stingy, Vassell allows her narrative to wander--or is it snooping? Her cast's choicest, cattiest thoughts tend toward the topics of class, status, and English identity; "No one called Rupert was broke" someone thinks approvingly about a character who will be familiar to readers of The Other Half.
Readers of The In Crowd should find both cold cases resolved to their satisfaction. As for Beauchamp's extended-family dynamics, Vassell seems to be just getting started messing them up--good news for fans of this droll and meaty series. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer