title: Past Tense: A Sloan and Crosby Mystery (Detective Chief Inspector C.D. Sloan)
author:  Catherine Aird 
description: Starred Review. In British veteran Aird's brilliantly sardonic 23rd fair-play whodunit featuring Calleshire County Det. Insp. C.D. Sloan and Sloan's sidekick, Detective Constable Crosby (after 2008's Losing Ground), Sloan starts with a relatively benign inquiry. The matron of the Berebury Nursing Home suspects that the room of a recently deceased resident, Josephine Short, was burglarized, but she can't be sure that anything was actually taken. Short left a sizable estate, but few survivors. The wife of her great-nephew, who didn't actually know her, made the funeral arrangements, and her only other blood relation is a grandson of whose existence other family members were unaware. The mystery of the possible theft may be linked to a 24-year-old woman, whose corpse, bearing bruises around the throat, a fisherman found floating Ophelia-like in the River Alm. Fans of Peter Lovesey's Victorian-era Sergeant Cribb novels should find Sloan a fitting modern-day counterpart. (Mar.) <br />(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: ## Prologue
  
  
  “You’ll be flying over in one of the company jets.
  
  
  It should be ready and waiting by the time we get to the airport.”
  
  
  Thomas Argeneau nodded, but his attention was on the clothes he was ripping
  from hangers in his walk-in closet and shoving into his knapsack.
  
  
  Etienne watched briefly and then burst out, “Why hasn’t Mother called?”
  
  
  Unable to answer the question, Thomas grimaced and shook his head. He found
  the whole situation upsetting. After seven hundred years as a housekeeper,
  Marguerite Argeneau had decided to start a career. But she hadn’t eased her
  way into the workforce with a secretarial job or some other mundane career.
  Instead, she’d decided she wanted to be the next Sam Spade, or Samantha Spade
  as the case may be. The woman, who had rarely left her home before this, had
  taken on a job as a private detective and flown off to Europe to locate the
  mother of a five-hundred-year-old vampire.
  
  
  While Thomas understood her desire to have a career to fill her tim