Book review: All Things Nice

THE title of Sheila Bugler’s third book alludes to the fact that the crime novel is the adult version of the child’s fairytale Set in London, and featuring the dogged DI Ellen Kelly of Lewisham CID, All Things Nice is a police procedural rooted in the nursery rhyme that warns us boys are composed of slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails.

The story opens with the murder of Keiran Burton, who is discovered stabbed to death in a laneway on the morning after Charlotte Gleeson celebrates her birthday party.

Keiran, we discover, is not a particularly nice man: he is a womaniser, a hypocrite, a leech on Charlotte’s daughter Freya and a man so morally degenerate he sleeps with Charlotte.