As an Amazon Associate, we may earn from qualifying purchases Affiliate disclosure
And Justice There Is None
Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James #8
And Justice There Is None (2002)
On a winter night in Notting Hill, Dawn Arrowood returns home from a doctor’s appointment carrying news that leaves her frightened rather than relieved: she is pregnant, and she has reason to believe her powerful older husband will not welcome the child. Before she can make sense of what to do next, she is attacked outside her house and murdered. That violent opening pulls Gemma James into a major case at a moment when she is trying to establish herself in a new role, while Duncan Kincaid is disturbed by how closely the killing resembles an older unsolved murder involving an antiques dealer.
What gives And Justice There Is None its tension is the way Deborah Crombie lets the case branch in two directions at once. One path leads through the antiques world and the people surrounding Dawn’s wealthy husband; the other reaches back into the racial tensions and unresolved violence of 1960s Notting Hill. Those strands gradually begin to converge, turning the novel into more than a present-day murder inquiry and giving it a deeper atmosphere of grievance, memory, and retribution.
The result is a mystery that feels both intimate and historically charged. Instead of relying only on the shock of the crime, Crombie builds suspense through divided loyalties, buried hatred, and the uneasy realization that justice delayed can harden into something far more dangerous.