It is unfortunate, at least in terms of Amazon searches, that this book shares the name of the 1979 Jack the Ripper/Sherlock Holmes film, but it is a decent read nonetheless. The initial premise is a rather clever hook. We are in Yorkshire and a serial burglar, a predator of grand houses whose owners are on holiday, goes for the obvious stuff like jewellery and antiques, but he has a quirk. He has a growing family, and he always raids his victims’ freezers for the high end stuff he always finds there. Expensive cuts of meat, game and seafood are all welcome at home, but his latest find? Not so much. It is the body of a young woman, wrapped in a carpet. Eventually he does the right thing and makes an anonymous phone call to the police, where the case falls into the lap of DI Mike Nash.

The novel has, almost inevitably these days, a prologue, which involves a trio of high-end kidnappers who have made a good living from kidnapping children of wealthy parents, who pay the ransom for their child’s return. It seems to have worked well, but one of the trio has reservations about the latest operation. In the first chapter proper, we witness the shooting of a man on a remote Yorkshire farm track. Is this connected with the kidnappers? As ever, we have to wait a while before everything is revealed.

The woman in the freezer is found to have died from a bullet wound, and then a third gunshot victim is found, this time in the unlikely location of a pheasant rearing cage on a local estate. For an ostensibly quiet rural area of Yorkshire, there seems to be rather a lot of handguns going off and killing people, and there is a fourth shooting. This time it is of the owner of an open-all-hours convenience store, and the victim has a rather dramatic past. Gunshots continues to resonate around The Dales, and the body of a man is found in a picturesque rental cottage. The discovery, by a Leeds couple, abruptly ends their hopes of a delightful weekend break, but their misfortune seems to draw a line under the convenience store shooting.

This is the twenty-first book of a series that began a quarter of a century ago, but what does Murder By Decree tell us about Mike Nash? He has a Spanish wife, Alondra, and they have two children. Daniel, Nash’s son from his first marriage is away at boarding school, while Lucy is at a local pre-school. Nash used to be an officer with the Metropolitan Police, but moved north after he was traumatised by a particularly horrific serial killer investigation.

Even the most diligent police investigations need a stroke of luck, and here it comes through seventeen year-old Daniel going for a romantic stroll with his girlfriend in a local holiday park. They hear what sounds like a child crying, and what they discover turns the case on its head.

Bill Kitson is the author of the DI Mike Nash thrillers, plus the Eden House Mysteries featuring amateur sleuths Adam Bailey and Eve Samuels. The Cowgill Family Saga is the latest addition, previously published independently, but now all commercially published. He also writes The Greek Island Romances along with several other titles, all published independently in support of a Greek charity for disabled children, ELEPAP. All royalties from these books are paid directly to the charity. Living and working throughout the north of England he is now retired from the finance industry and lives on the east coast, where his writing never stops. He can often be found on a Greek island, staring out to sea, laptop at the ready.

I thoroughly enjoyed this. It is ‘only’ a police procedural, but it is a complex, nuanced and engaging read, with an authentic Yorkshire background. It will be published by Joffe Books on 4th November.