"Sunlight to children of sun, blood to children of dark."
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(3.5 stars) Living in "retirement" in Miami, Florida, where their son Nick is head of the sociology department at the university, the irascible Horace Rumpole and his wife Hilda ("She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed") are enjoying the warm winter weather and sunlight. When Tiffany Jones, a young professor at the university, disappears, shortly after she has flirted with Rumpole at a party, he is as perturbed as are her many friends. Simultaneously, Rumpole reads in a London newspaper, sent by friends, that a struggling young accountant has been arrested for the gory murder of a wealthy aristocrat in a London "tube" station. A message written in blood is found beside his body.
Rumpole cannot resist the lure of returning to London to work on this "blood" case, and Hilda soon joins him, but he discovers that his desk in chambers is now occupied by Ken Cracknell, an overconfident young man with no experience defending a murder case. It is Ken who will defend Simpson, the accountant, but he agrees to let Rumpole work as his "assistant" in this sensational murder investigation. The two locations--Florida, where Tiffany has disappeared, and London, where Simpson has been arrested and charged with murder--come together when Tiffany and Simpson both prove to have been interested in a cult, Children of the Sun.
Written in 1982, this mystery is a product of its times, a time when "Moonies" were dominating the news, and the novel's "surprises" are not very surprising when seen from the contemporary vantage point. Side plots involving Rumpole's history with Judge Bullingham, his possible representation of the aggrieved wife of a philandering barrister, the romantic dalliances of Phyllida (Trant) Erskine-Brown with other members of Chambers, and his son Nick's arrival, which leads to his helping Rumpole on the Simpson case, fill out the novel.
Author John Mortimer has written the Rumpole novels out of chronological sequence re Rumpole's career, so it is disconcerting to have Rumpole coming out of retirement at an early point in what becomes a long sequence of Rumpole novels and stories. This novel feels flat and unfocused, as if Mortimer were trying to figure out where to go with it--and with Rumpole and Hilda--at this early stage in the Rumpole series. Rumpole's presumed "retirement" because of his lack of confidence after losing ten cases in a row seems inconsistent with his enormous arrogance and ego, and is hard to swallow for the reader. With its unusually large number of distractions, this novel is one of Rumpole's less organized adventures. n Mary Whipple
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