The characters are like the pieces of a jigsaw, in that each one of them holds an incomplete part of the story. North London was the city at its most forbidding and, despite the widening of the streets, its most claustrophobic. Another issue I wasn’t convinced by (and which I’ve noticed other reviewers have highlighted) is her treatment of the gay characters. After another death, the evidence suggests that both crimes are linked to a murder committed amid the devastating trench warfare of WWI. If you change the name Jospehine Tey to Wilhelmina Sausage, does it make any difference to the story?

The solution to the crimes is only possible when an older mystery of a death in the trenches is also solved - the job of the police, and of Josephine when she finally does become more of a central character towards the end of the book, is to hear everyone's story and put together the pieces.

Firstly, I have to say I found the writing a bit plodding in places – the construction is quite self-conscious, dropping references in so we know where this is happening, who it is happening to and who they are/why they are famous etc. Twenty years after it started, the war had reinvented its suffering for a second generation in the form of inescapable confinement with the sick and wounded, and an eventual loss whose pain was the more sharply felt for its delay. To be fair, Upson seems to have caught Elizabeth Mackintosh's personality very well; confusion of naming aside, this is definitely the same figure who emerges from everything else I've read about her.

Instinctively, before she had a chance to consider the strangeness of the moment, she took the gift that was held out to her with a smile and looked down at the doll in her hands, a souvenir of her beloved play and something she had longed to own. The hand that gripped the back of her neck, holding her close, was swift and sure, and by now no strength was needed. Upson doles out period detail, not in a surge of encyclopedic re-telling,but as a backdrop for the scenes as they play out, providing the clues needed to piece together the compulsion that drives someone to murder. Back in 1934 she's very successful, her play "Richard of Bordeaux" is on the final week of it's very successful run in London before it goes on a countrywide tour and possibly film Her arrival coincides with a complicated murder, this drags in an old friend, Detective Inspector Archie Penrose and both of them have to look into their pasts to fix the present.Already this spring, we've had the movie Fade to Black, in which Orson Welles investigates a murder, and Justine Picardie's novel Daphne, in which Daphne du Maurier is the gumshoe. Being a crime book and a murder mystery it would be churlish of me to say any more and give anything away. I don’t know anyone else who could spend a day with all that enthusiasm and still look sane at the end of it. It was hardly the sort of thing that Josephine would ever wear herself, and it made her own plain velvet seem bland in comparison, but she admired its delicate beauty nonetheless. An Expert In Murder” is set in London in the 1930s and revolves around deaths associated with a production of Josephine Tays most successful play.