BOTTOM LINE: One of the best Sigrid Harald stories, so far (#5 of 8), with a strong theater-based plot (one of my fave sorts of mysteries) and a nice wallop of emotional stuff mixed in as well. A classy-but-flashy child psychologist and her nephew are at a neighborhood dance troupe's Halloween performance for children when the lead dancer is killed, onstage, while under a spotlight, in full view of the audience. Sigrid is assigned the case, and while her roommate Roman is the scenario writer for the production he tries to make himself not too obvious, a good thing, as in earlier books he was awfully florid, um, in a nice way, but a bit overwhelming. Here the focus is mainly upon Sigrid and her team of detectives as they try to parse out what exactly *did* happen, as both the dancers and the audience don't seem to be able to pin anything down for certain. And the opportunistic psychologist doesn't help things much. Maron does something a bit different with this book, putting in occasional short chapters that are the notes from the psychologist's journal, and in these we get to know her rather too well, and she's not exactly a saint. The structure of this novel feels a bit weird at first, though, as it reads more like a linked novella (Sigrid's investigation) and short story (psychologist's working with a particularly difficult client) rather than a truly integrated novel. Although the ending is both shocking *and* effective and emotionally ties into the story somewhat (a tenuous link with the dance company) the two bits are, except for the psychologists' participation, not truly connected. But the focus is not only on the child-like dancers and their free-wheeling lives, but also upon the kids who flock to their small school, and it's well-done. The main interest is upon four children in particular: two brothers and a sister who are always "hanging around, underfoot..." and a child from the neighborhood who was murdered about six months previously. The tying together of the children's personalities, the dancer's personalities and peculiarities, and the murder plot is well-done, and there's the extra added plus - major plus! - of advancement of Sigrid's relationship with Oscar. All together, this, somehow, "works" very well, and delivers quite an emotional punch at the end.
