The Detective's Daughter

This is the first of the series by Lesley Thomson featuring Stella Darnell, who runs a successful cleaning company in London called Clean Slate. Stella's father, Terry Darnell was head of the Hammersmith branch of the police department and a good detective, to the detriment of his family life. His wife, Stella's mom, left when Stella was 7 years old and Stella did not see much of Terry after that. She has been estranged from him for decades and blames him for their lack of relationship. As we learn through flashbacks, Terry was in fact a devoted dad to Stella and cherished their time together. Terry suddenly dies at the age of 68 from a heart attack and in the process of clearing his house, Stella realizes that he was trying to solve a 30-year-old cold case, the murder of Kate Rokesmith in 1981. Terry was the lead investigator and he has finally figured out who the killer is--not the husband as the police assumed for years. Kate's 4-year old son, Jonathan, may have witnessed the murder but has been mute on the incident ever since.
Stella is a flawed but still engaging character, bothered by mess and clutter and living in a sparsely populated condominium building by herself with plastic covers still on the sofa. She decides she does not love the man she has been seeing for some time, Paul, and tries to break off the relationship but he begins stalking her. One of Stella's most demanding and somewhat demented clients, and a neighbor of Terry's, Mrs. Ramsay is the next to die; the police believe it to be an accident. Then Paul drowns while drunk, in the same place that Kate Rokesmith was murdered on the banks of the Thames River. Stella is joined in her informal investigation by Jack Harmon, who applies for a job with her cleaning company. He is a very good cleaner, but he also breaks into people's houses and lives in them secretly until he decides they are no longer of interest. Jack already has a job; he drives a subway train on the "dead late shift."  He sees patterns in numbers and messages in events around him, and, it turns out, he is Kate Rokesmith's grown son. Stella begins dating a dentist, Ivan Challoner, who she discovers is the half-brother of another neighbor of Terry's, sculptor Sarah Glyde. Sounds twisty and a bit contrived and it is. There are long sections of narrative in the early parts of the book that are not attributed to a named person, but it is clearly someone with ill intent. Stella is being stalked by someone besides Paul, although she doesn't realize it. Thomson is good at creating a pervasive sense of menace with this ploy as well as with small observations like the timer on the security lights at her condo being set incorrectly so they were on in the day and off at night.
A novel aspect of Lesley Thompson's website is the collection of photos she uses to imagine settings and characters. There is a "gallery" for each book.