enerally speaking, I’m a fan of what we might call the unlocked room mystery. The kind where someone is murdered or otherwise indisposed and we are then introduced to a wide variety of characters who may or may not have something to do with it or each other. Then all you have to do is wait patiently for the doughty police officers in charge to sniff out any red herrings and present you with the individual or web responsible.
It starts with a dramatically squandered kidnap. In the corridor of a New York hotel, a young man is quietly nabbed by three figures, wearing replica masks of the royal family, and unobtrusively stuffed in a suitcase – so unobtrusively that I didn’t notice until a second viewing – and wheeled out.
There is Oxford academic Tara , who has an activist streak born of her working-class and/or Mancunian origins , a messy private life , and an unrewarding tweenage daughter, Daisy. There is Nat , who lives in Peckham, is about to get married and has a wad of cash and a burner phone hidden in her bedroom. She uses some of the former to pay off the loan shark pursuing her mother.