title: A Commonplace Killing: A Novel
author:  Sin Busby 
description: In the midst of a crime wave in London in 1946, a woman found strangled in a bombsite is called a commonplace killing. But Divisional Detective Inspector Jim Cooper is bothered by it. The victim does not seem to be a tart, her state of dress aside, and this does not seem a standard sex crime. Separate narrations in an intricately constructed chronology follow the police investigation, the victim, and the perpetrator, and each plotline is permeated with the atmosphere of deprivation and depression of postwar London, with rationing and black marketing, homes barely habitable because of bombing, returning veterans scarred by their experiences and scrambling to find work, women missing the former atmosphere of sexual abandon, and everyone trying to adjust to life as it has become. In fiction based on fact, Busby not only captures time and place but makes them key players in this fast-moving crime novel with its characters indelibly marked by war. Busby died in September 2012 at 51, just after finishing this novel. Her death is a loss to the world of writing. --Michele Leber
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  ![](../Images/00002.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Strangers in Death
  
  
  
  
  
  By J. D. Robb  
  
  
  
  
  
  Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
  —OLIVERWENDELLHOLMES
  
  
  
  
  
  One cannot be in two places at once.  —SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PROVERB
  
  
  
  
  
  1
  
  
  
  
  
  MURDER HARBORED NO BIGOTRY, NO BIAS. IT subscribed to no class system. In its
  gleeful, deadly, and terminally judicious way, murder turned a blind eye on
  race, creed, gender, and social stratum. As Lieutenant Eve Dallas stood in the
  sumptuous bedroom of the recently departed Thomas A. Anders, she considered
  that.
  
  
  
  
  
  Only the night before she’d caught—and closed—a case dealing with the homicide
  of a twenty-year-old woman who’d been throttled, beaten, then chucked out the
  window of her nine-story flop.
  
  
  
  
  
  The rent-by-the-week flop, Eve mused, where the victim’s boyfriend claimed to
  have slept through her demise, smelled of stale sex, stale zoner, and really
  bad Chinese food. Anders? His Park Avenue bedroom smel