A Death in Mayfair

London, December 1941. In the same week that Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and the United States enters the war, film star Laura Curzon falls to her death from her Mayfair apartment. What first appears to be suicide becomes one of two troubling cases for DCI Frank Merlin when the body of a strangled young woman is also discovered among bomb-damaged ruins. His inquiries lead into the capital’s film world, organised crime and private obsessions.

The fourth Frank Merlin novel uses America’s entry into the Second World War as a turning point in the background to its London murder investigation. The principal crime plot and entertainment-industry characters are fictional, while Pearl Harbor and the conditions of bomb-damaged wartime London are historical. Ellis uses that contrast to show a city in which national emergency coexists with ordinary criminality and personal corruption.