From Publishers Weekly
The notion of a "Second City" within London, an uneasy alliance of new money and old poverty set in the Docklands area, has proved a singularly effective one for Butler, whose copper John Coffin (last seen in A Coffin for Charley) has steadily risen through the ranks. Here, two of his policemen have died in apparent accidents. Coffin, suspicious, dispatches Phoebe Astley, a onetime paramour, to a clothing boutique suspected of laundering money, as part of an undercover operation. Then a charred body found near a strange tree seems to have belonged to the wife of one of Coffin's dead cops. But little is what it seems to be. Phoebe disappears and an unattached head (one item in a large body and body-part count) is sighted floating in the Thames. The frightened woman in charge of the store and the secretive pensioner who labors on artistic artifacts beneath the eerie tree are just two of the many odd souls who inhabit this brooding tale. Butler has fun teasing us with the identities of the dead, and Coffin's actress wife Stella Pinero, who manages to be both likable and thoroughly theatrical at the same time, adds some levity to these dark proceedings. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The Coffin Tree ANNOTATION
The career of Butler's policeman, John Coffin, keeper of the peace in London's Second City, has been recorded in twenty-odd volumes as he moved steadily upward in the force. Faced with having to replace two officers who have died recently under mysterious circumstances, Coffin discreetly recruits a policewoman to find out the real story behind their "accidents."
FROM THE PUBLISHER
That summer when the old Docklands of London sweltered in the great heat... was the summer when John Coffin walked his Second City of London and felt that life was unraveling about him... Something had to be done and it was for him to do it. Two of Coffin's young detectives had died - deaths that were said to be accidental. In Coffin's view, however, two accidents are two too many. Commander John Coffin is not a fanciful man, but somehow the half-dead tree, its top killed by lightning, standing in a sad patch of rough earth, seems to him to epitomize his problems. Why did the two policemen die? How did one dead police officer's wife come to die a grisly death herself at the foot of the coffin tree? Coffin can't believe that it was suicide. Beyond these concerns, Coffin is uneasy about his relationship with the mercurial actress, Stella Pinero, whom he married after a long on-and-off romance. It is when Stella, whose art has taught her to look deep into the human psyche, sets things right between them that Coffin is able to seek the answers he knows are there.
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