The seam of the autistic investigator, for long deeply buried has been fruitfully mined in recent times. Tim Sullivan’s DS George Cross is perhaps the prime example, and there is also Washington Poe’s sidekick Tilly Bradshaw, but now AJ Cross wields her pick and introduces forensic scientist Professor Teigan Craft. She is incisive, brilliant and perceptive, but the world of conversational nuance, metaphor and allusion is as remote to her as the surface of The Red Planet.
In crime novels, such characters need police partners, and here we have DCI Steve Thompson, a good officer, but currently distracted by his failing marriage.Together, they investigate the disappearance of Riley McCarthy, a nurse with the cardiac surgery unit at the local hospital. Her body is subsequently found in the burnt-out shell of her car.
As a teenager, Riley had been awarded substantial damages after being hit by a rogue driver. She banked the money, but when Thompson and Craft serve a warrant on her bank, they see that she withdrew every penny just days before she disappeared. The pair smell a particularly malodorous rodent, but Riley’s. colleagues on the cardiac unit remain tight lipped. Was Riley ‘just’ a competent and empathetic nurse and good at her job, or is there a personal relationship hidden beneath the terse answers to the questions?
Senior surgeon Charles Fredericks is a deeply unpleasant individual, controlling and narcissistic, but is he a killer? And does senior nurse Elspeth Goren harbour some kind of grudge that would have ended in murder? Teigan ‘Tig’ Craft is much more socially aware than George Cross or Tilly Bradshaw. She has a partner, Tom, and so the sexual side of her nature is addressed. Also, she has a growing library of conversational metaphors and what they actually mean.
A person of interest at the hospital where Riley worked is HR director, George Appleby. When he is discovered dead, having apparently thrown himself from a high window, the mystery deepens. Some crime novelists set us on a journey, and the road may be long, but there are no diversions or unexpected turnings. I’ll stay with the road metaphor, because AJ Cross takes us down a byroad, and the metaphor becomes literal. Years earlier, anaesthetist Matthew Weaver’s world was plunged into chaos when his wife and daughter were killed in an inexplicable road accident near Bristol. The police were unable to trace the driver of the Transit van that nudged Penny Weaver’s car off the slip road to its destruction at the bottom of a ravine.
In the end the death of Penny Weaver and her daughter is just one piece of the jigsaw that Craft and Thompson complete to bring a surprising killer to justice. The Fatal End is immersive and cleverly written, and full of the the authentic detail that AJ Cross, herself a forensic psychologist brings to the narrative. It is published by Joffe Books and available now.