The original Morbid Kitchen was the custom of boiling the heads of criminals and trouble-makers, then putting these preserved heads on spikes at the southern side of the old inhabited London Bridge as a deterrent to other malefactors. Miss Melville, the inventor of the womens' police procedural, starts this 1995 story gently with the staff of a former Windsor private school for Royalty and aristocracy pondering the deteriorating building, closed a decade earlier when a pupil was found decapitated and a teacher missing. The current owner asks Charmian to be with her when she opens up the school and its boarded basement prior to selling. When this ominous basement is opened a woman's body is found with a preserved head between the legs. Ah ha, the missing teacher - but no!
Check all the staff and visitors even the postman and beat bobby, now an Inspector keen on writing up real crimes. An informer starts telling Daniels' assistant about another corpse - but then is found himself, masked and with his throat savagely cut, in the park. The missing teacher's body is found, the first corpse identified. The house owner disappears. Echoes of earlier crimes are re-whispered. The claustrophobic atmosphere is lightened by some accurate divination.
In the finale Charmian Daniels is nearly decapitated herself - such a tidy way it is stressed throughout - before the case is closed to appear in a true crime volume. The early crimes recycled tell us the child is father to the man - or mother to the woman. A brilliantly written novel, with a most artistic cover which recalls Tom Adams at his best.
