fullybooked2017

Police Scotland’s Detective Inspector Cara Salt has been sidelined (because of a serious career blip, of which more later) into what can only be described as a dry and dusty branch of law enforcement, the Succession, Inheritance and Executory Department, SIE for short. Their job is to deal with breaches of the law that happen as a consequence of wills that upset people who assumed they were going to be beneficiaries but, for whatever reason, feel they have been short-changed.

A celebrity hedge fund manager, Sebastian Pallander has died on TV. No, not ‘died’ as in a comedian who fails to get a laugh, but ‘died’ as in suffering a massive heart attack while being interviewed on a live politics programme. It is his will – and its consequences – that are central to this story. When one of Sebastian’s sons, Jean Luc, manages to blow himself up while trying to sabotage a wind turbine, DI Salt is initially surprised to be asked to investigate. Along with her recently acquired assistant, DS Abernathy Blackstock, she visits the site of the wind farm, and finds that young Jean Luc is in many pieces, decoratively spread across the Scottish hillside.

Blackstock is not all he seems to be. The fifty-something Sergeant has not only been working on a top secret investigation into the late Sebastian Pallander’s links to highly dubious Russian money men, but he is the scion of a formerly wealthy branch of Scotland’s aristocracy.

One by one, the Pallander siblings seem to be the in the cross hair gun-sights of some rather nasty people. First Tabitha is kidnapped, then rescued by a mysterious man who tells her that she and her husband must make themselves scarce. When the hotel they are staying in, anonymously, catches fire, Cara Salt decides that Tabitha needs sanctuary – with none other than her former boyfriend – and fellow copper, Sorley MacLeod, now running a  laptop refurbishment business in London, but with an lonely fishing cottage out in the Essex marshes as a retreat.

Meanwhile, Silas Pallander, once destined to take over his father’s business but – since the reading of the will – relegated to manager of the family estate, has also been seized, along with his personal assistant Anna. He is forced to sign certain papers, and then the gang make a hasty exit, leaving Silas and Anna to emerge, blinking, from their captivity, to find themselves in a disused Belgian airfield.

About halfway through the book, we learn the reason that Cara Salt is now involved in a policing operation that is as far from the mean streets of Glasgow as it could be. She had headed up a police take-down of a violent local gangster. It went pear-shaped and, faced with her Detective Sergeant – Sorley MacLeod – being held at gunpoint by the man who was the target of their raid, she took a chance and fired two shots. The first shattered MacLeod’s shoulder, but the second hit the gangster right between the eyes. Salt was sidelined and, after a long and painful recovery, MacLeod left both the police force and the world of Cara Salt.

Macleod and Tabitha Pallender, after a helter-skelter chase and a too-close-for-comfort brush with the bad guys, are eventually reunited with Salt and Blackstock, and are whisked back to relative safety in the Pallander company helicopter. However, anyone connected to the Pallander financial empire is about to enter a whole world of hurt. Pallander and his associates had for years basically been operating a Bernie Madoff-style financial scam and, with his death, the corporate chickens are about to come home to roost.

Towards the end of the book Denzil Meyrick (left) throws a sizeable spanner into the works in terms of what we think we know about what is going on, but this nothing to the shock we get during his version of the classic crime novel denouement in the library. In this case, it’s not the library, but the baronial dining room of Meikle House, the home of the Pallanders. The Estate is fast paced, witty and full of those plot twists that make Meyrick’s books so entertaining. It is published by Transworld/Bantam and is available now.