Police Procedural

SOME SORT OF JUSTICE . . . Between the covers

I recently reviewed An Accidental Death, the first of the Peter Grainger novels to be republished by Hutchinson Heinemann. This is a longer and more complex book and the central character, Detective Sergeant David ‘DC’ Smith has now left Norfolk Constabulary, and has been working for Diver and Diver Associates, a firm of private investigators in the Norfolk town of Kings Lake.

The book begins with Kings Lake copper DCI Cara Freeman being asked to handle a re-investigation into the death of Lord Frederick Thorpe, a young peer who drowned in the swimming pool of wealthy Norfolk businessman eighteen months earlier. The investigation into his death had been carried out by another team and, to put it plainly, it has now proved to have been error strewn. Lord Thorpe’s sister, unhappy with how things had been handled, hired Diver and Diver to investigate, and what they found now threatens to become a very public scandal. Freeman must now discover the truth, but with Thorpe long since cremated, will she find conspiracy or cock-up?

Crime writing, from my observations, isn’t like Lego or Meccano (younger readers will have to Google that) in that it is not just a matter of putting the bits together to make the final model.Writers have a series of structural options to involve the reader. Some I hate with a vengeance, such as the split time narrative which uses chapter headings like ‘Two years earlier’ or ‘Six weeks later’. Then there is the ominous prologue, where something apparently unrelated to the main narrative occurs, leaving us wondering how it will resolve.

Grainger uses a variant of that here. A woman is nursing her dying father, Charles McAllister, a retired financial advisor. He dies, peacefully. She organises his funeral, and subsequently learns that she has inherited a large sum of money. How this parallel line will converge with the investigation into the death of Frederick Thorpe is, 120 pages in, anyone’s guess.

As the case unfolds, it appears that what DDA discovered was a plan by Freddie and some of his politically active friends to put pressure on an MP over his support for military equipment sales to Israel. After Freddie’s demise these youngsters had been approached by a man and a woman and warned that they were involved in a very serious business, and that they had upset some dangerous people. Mossad agents operating in bucolic Norfolk? That seems to be the only explanation, implausible though it may sound.

Peter Grainger drip-feeds us clues about who Ms McAllister is, and how she is relevant to the Thorpe affair. She works for the intelligence service, but has been on extended leave. She meets up with a colleague, Ricketts:
“There’s trouble with a previous job. A bit of smoke, as if it’s still burning somewhere underground. I don’t know all the details.”
When Ricketts looked at her directly, she said,
“Which job?”
And he said,
“Norfolk.”

Ingenious and original the plot may be, but the tungsten core of this novel lies in the wonderful ensemble writing that describes the police team. DCI Cara Freeman, at its head may be small in stature but she has a steel will, and suffers fools not at all. At her side is the imperturbable and ruthlessly methodical DI Tom Greene, while DS Chris Waters may be the relatively new ‘boy’ but, he served a long and fruitful apprenticeship with former Sergeant David Smith who, of course, is observing the proceedings with the detachment of an outsider – with the wisdom and savvy of someone with inside knowledge. Some Sort of Justice will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann on 4th June.

June 3, 2026 0

DEATH AT THE CASTLE GATES . . . Between the covers

We are back on duty with Nick Oldham’s gutsy Lancashire cop, Sergeant Jessica Raker. We are in the unpretentious town of Clitheroe, and Raker’s colleague DC Doolan is in the final stages of pancreatic cancer, but is determined to do his job until the – literally – bitter end.

They are hunting a local low-life called Rory Walton, now wanted for murder, after he fire bombed his girlfriend’s house. She subsequently died while in intensive care. Although a raid on Walton’s hideout goes pear-shaped, the police discovered a cache of cannabis and firearms. More importantly, it triggers a memory in Doolan’s mind – the shadow of a twenty year-old unsolved murder case, which Oldham gives us a glimpse of in a brief prologue.

Hanging over the book, the series even, is the baleful shadow of Mags Horsefield (nee Goss) a once beautiful but always formidable woman who ruled with a local criminal reign of terror, but has now disappeared, along with her daughter Caitlin, a great friend of Jess’s daughter Lily.

We soon learn that Mags is alive and well. With Caitlin, she is living in a secure villa in Malta, protected by bodyguards and the same ferocious XL Bully dogs who terrorised her Lancashire scrapyard. Her criminal web is largely intact, and she sits at its centre, like a malevolent spider, controlling her empire via burner phones.

Back in Clitheroe, Jess Raker’s life becomes ever more complex. Her absent – and errant – husband, living away because of work, seems likely to become very ‘ex’. Rory Walton has teamed up with his equally-criminal brother, and she has to concoct a plan to take them down.

Her Boss, DI Price is determined to belittle her at every opportunity and is (unknown to her) in the pay of serious criminals. Added to those problems, she has encountered the spirits of two children murdered in Victorian times. It is unusual for Nick Oldham to venture into supernatural territory, and I was intrigued to see how this thread would be resolved.

As one might expect from an ex-copper, Oldham makes the policing details utterly utterly convincing and, as with his long running and much loved character Henry Christie, he makes Jess Raker very human and totally believable. Death at the Castle Gates will be published by Severn House on 2nd June. To read my reviews of earlier novels in this series, click this link.

May 31, 2026 0

JUST KILL . . . Between the covers.

Leah Hutch is a detective working with London’s Metropolitan Police, and she has two murders to solve. That of Ray King is bizarre. His corpse is found on the downstairs sofa of Gabriel McMahon – who swears he has never met the dead man. Sarah Franks, a teacher with a drug problem is found with her throat cut in her dingy flat.
It is an unwritten rule of crime fiction, at least in Britain, that police detectives have to be emotionally damaged in some way. I could list examples, but most CriFi fans will know what I mean. Leah Hutch ticks most of the boxes. Her father, Eli Carson, murdered her mother and boyfriend when Leah was little, and is now serving a life sentence. Leah was brought up by her paternal grandmother, Margaretta who was loving – but in her own peculiar way.
A friend from Hutch’s schooldays, Sami Mograbi, is found near the scene of Sarah’s murder, but there is no evidence to connect him with the killing.There is also an apparently unconnected parallel plot. A teenager, Zechariah Okoro – known as Zed – is troubled, because his mother has gone missing. The conundrum about what Zed has to do with the story resolves in dramatic fashion. The boy, alone in his mother’s bouse for 24 hours, has noticed a man watching the property. After following the stranger across London, Zed sees the man leave his home, apparently for a run. Zed breaks in. The next thing we know is that Hutch and her sidekick Randle have decided to pay Gabriel McMahon a visit. No reply to their knocks. They phone him and hear his mobile ringing inside the house. After forcing an entry, they find two people. McMahon is dead. Very dead, his blood spattered over the walls. The second person is a terrified Zed, in a foetal crouch, hiding in a wardrobe.
Approaching the half way point of the novel, we have are led to believe that there is a professional killer at work. We know him as Chris. He is currently employed by someone as yet unknown, and we assume he is responsible for the deaths of Sarah Franks, Ray King, Gabriel McMahon and – possibly – the disappearance of Zed’s mother. My initial reaction was that Chris doesn’t ‘disappear’ people – he simply murders them and leaves their corpses to provide puzzles for the police.
Zed’s mother, Ogechi Okoro, is eventually found alive, after being kidnapped and tortured. Hutch finally discovers a link between Okoro, McMahon and Mograbi. They all studied medicine together at university. But what of Sarah Franks, and Ray King? That question is temporarily pushed to one side when Mograbi is found dead, killed by the same clinical slash to the carotid artery that ended the lives of Sarah Franks and Gabriel McMahon.
Hutch discovers something else about the three former medical students – they each took time out to do what was basically work experience in Ghana. Hutch flies to Ghana to investigate – unofficially – and what she discovers not only links the three med students, but also Ray King and Sarah Franks. We also learn that a woman called Bisi, who we know has been followed by the mysterious killer, Chris, was also in the same Accra hospital.
There is yet another turn in the plot road, but this time it is more of a hairpin than a gentle bend. The killer of Sarah, Gabriel and Sami is brought to justice, and the final pages hint at a resolution to one of Hutch’s Great Unknowns – the location of her murdered mother’s grave.
British Nigerian Emmy-nominated producer, Remi Kone has worked on a number of well-known television dramas, such as KILLING EVE, SPOOKS and LEWIS. She lives in London, and Just Kill is her second novel. It is cleverly written, with a veritable vortex of a plot, is published by Quercus and is available now.

May 7, 2026 0

WITCH HUNT . . . Between the covers

Detective Superintendent Grace O’Malley, of London’s Met Police, is not going to feature in a Sunday evening TV prime time cosy crime series any time soon. She rides a Harley, is rude and abrasive and, for good measure, her husband has a penchant for BDSM sex with students looking to supplement their income. In another part of the city (it is Halloween) we have Juliette Boucher, a TV journalist. She receives a bizarre phone call from a man who calls himself the Witchfinder General. He tells her to be on Westminster bridge just before midnight, where she will witness something beyond newsworthy.

And spectacular it is. And gory. A motor launch comes into view, and it is on fire. On it is standing a woman. She burns, too. Then, there is a series of explosions, and the boat sinks. Here’s the thing. It was the so-called Witchfinder General who phoned Grace to tip her off about her husband’s sexual proclivities. When the police try to trace the owner of the boat, they find that it was sold by a retired civil servant to a man called – wait for it – Matthew Hopkins.

For younger readers, the real Matthew Hopkins was a Protestant zealot who, around the time of the English Civil War, toured the eastern counties of the country – Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire – in search of those he called witches. It is estimated that he had over two hundred women – mostly guilty of nothing more than being herbalists or natural healers – violently put to death.
The man who has named himself after this monster is clearly very clever, has sources inside the police force, and is hell-bent on recreating a reign of terror. His first victim, the woman in the boat? Veronica Crosse, a TV medium and celebrity speaker.

The authors have added another (potentially corrosive) spice to their recipe, and one that is not directly connected to the man who has modeled himself on a 17th century serial killer. Grace’s husband Dominic is himself a copper, but not just any old plod. He is Assistant Commissioner Dominic Boswell, of New Scotland Yard.

We are introduced to a bizarre clergyman named Moses Blackmore, who is the incumbent of a tiny parish near Yeovil. He wears a long black coat, a string tie and has a long silver beard. His human flock (he is also a farmer) are less of a congregation than a cult, and are in thrall to Blackmore’s fire and brimstone brand of protestant fundamentalism. While the police procedural aspect of the book had, this far, been impeccably convincing, I realised that there would be a horror-fantasy element to the narrative, too. That is not a problem. I am a huge fan of John Connolly’s Charlie Parker novels, in which he effortlessly blends the PI genre with the supernatural. It’s just that these days, the Church of England simply does not allow an old fashioned vicar to run a single parish. In real life, Moses Blackmore would be in charge of at least four or five other nearby parishes. And, most likely, he would be a woman.

A little over a third of the way through, there is a dramatic raid and arrest in an upmarket London hotel but, of course, it’s the wrong man, and yet another example of the WFG playing the police like a Stradivarius. There is a second murder, this time of another elderly woman spiritualist, hanged from a church tower and then burned. The WFG (and his associates) cause the filmed scene to be played out on a big screen at a huge public gathering in London on Bonfire Night.

Grace eventually cracks the case (or so she thinks) and finds that the perpetrators are connected to some of the most powerful and influential people in government and public service. There is the mother of all twists in the final pages, but I don’t do spoilers, so you will have to find out for yourself. Witch Hunt is an imaginative and energetic canter through the fields of corruption, revenge, and madness, and it will be published by Severn House on 5th May.

May 3, 2026 0

DEADLY FORCE . . . Between the covers

Being ‘late to the party’ in terms of long running crime fiction series is an occupational hazard for amateur reviewers. Yes, we try to cover the ‘big ones’ by such authors as Val McDermid (Tony Hill/Karen Pirie) Peter James (Roy Grace), Mark Billingham (Tom Thorne), John Connolly (Charlie Parker) or David Mark (Aector McAvoy) but there are only so many hours in the day, and sometimes we miss things. The Bill Slider books by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles are, judging by this book, one such, and a series that I regret not discovering years ago.
If I may, I will write briefly about the economics of publishing, as it is relevant here. Some crime writers are, relatively speaking, household names, and their books are found on the shelves of TESCO and ASDA. This will be a little while after launch date, and the price will be less than the Amazon tab. In another universe altogether, let us look at libraries. Usually run by County Councils outside of the big cities, these amazing institutions loan books, free of charge to members. Although we are talking pennies, authors receive royalties when their books are borrowed. Severn House is a publisher that specialises in crime books to be sold to libraries. Their Amazon prices reflect this. After all, who would pay £21.98 for Deadly Force, as good as it is? The answer is – buyers for libraries. I am not sure if that is what they actually pay, but that is what Amazon tells us. Of course your ‘free’ library book has already been paid for – by you – through your council tax. Nowadays, local libraries have had to become more ‘inclusive’ by providing computer and internet access to increase footfall, which is all the bean counters at County Hall understand. Incidentally, Severn House has now been taken over by Joffe Books, a very different kind of publisher.
Digression over, so back to the book. DI Bill Slider is an astute and amenable Met Police copper working out of Shepherd’s Bush. For out of towners , this is an area of west London, seedy but expensive in terms of housing, well served by London Transport. A body is found in a silted up canal. The corpse is quickly identified as that of Peter Bentley, an unremarkable policeman, working out of Notting Hill. He has been battered to death by someone who was probably, wielding a tire iron.
Slider’s enquiries are painstaking, but some facts emerge. Bentley is estranged from his wife, has a zero social media presence and, in his private life, wore an expensive diamond ear stud – which is missing from his corpse.Just about half way through the book, the story takes a delicious twist. The diamond earring is found and, long story short, it was a gift to Bentley from his lover, a wealthy 50-something former actress. Unfortunately for Slider and his team, this new information solves nothing, and only sends a middle-aged Polish couple into the court system for petty theft.
Then, from what seems like a complete dead-end, Slider’s persistence finds a thread of evidence and, when he tugs it, the fabric protecting the killer of Peter Bentley rapidly unravels and the killer – uncomfortably close to home – is brought to justice. This is a beautifully written and literate thriller that occasionally sparkles with sharp comedy. Deadly Force will be published by Severn House on 5th May.

May 1, 2026 0

AN ACCIDENTAL DEATH . . . Between the covers

Low ranking coppers are relatively rare in British Cri-Fi. Most central characters are Detective Inspectors. A wise choice, because their rank enables them access to both the grim reality of crime scenes and the frequently fraught pretense of scheduled media briefings. Here, it seems that David Smith, despite being close to retirement age, is still a Detective Sergeant, albeit a very good one. Smith is something of a paradox in that he is both straightforward and complex. His relatively simple approach to detective work involves observation, recording, listening – and then more observation.
We know that he has been demoted from a more senior rank due to a case that went badly wrong. He is a widower, and lives quietly on his own, but we suspect the shade of his wife Sheila is never far away. Despite his appearance – dressed in clean, but slightly shabby, ‘old men’s’ clothes – he is a closet guitarist, and an admirer of both the old blues men and Eric Clapton.This book was first self-published in 2016, but has now been reprinted by Hutchinson Heinemann.
Central to the story is the death of a teenager, found dead in the river after he was last seen diving in, and playing high jinx with a passing canoeist. The setting is the Norfolk town of Kings Lake. A pseudonym for Kings Lynn? Possibly, but not in terms of the river. Lynn’s river, the Great Ouse is very wide, very dirty and very deep – and not the sort of water anyone in their right minds would jump into. This river has more the feel of one of the rivers that make up the Norfolk Broads, full of pleasure boats and picturesque riverside pubs.
When the dead boy’s body is examined, it shows mysterious bruises, and tell-tale signs that someone had tried to administer CPR. Smith persuades his boss that they have, at best a manslaughter on their hands, and possibly a murder. The early investigation centres on the canoeist with whom the dead boy may have had a confrontation. The canoe was hired by ‘a foreign-sounding man’, and Smith, exploring the riverbank a few miles upstream, discovers what is left of it – in the ashes of a bonfire. Nearby is a former stately home, now surrounded by top security fences and – as Smith discovers when he wanders in through a gap in the fence – staffed by serious ex-military types.
Through an old contact, Smith makes enquiries about the man in charge, a suave former army officer. It seems he spent some time in Bosnia in the 1990s, and when a cigarette packet found on the river bank is identified as Bosnian brand, the investigation takes a sinister – and potentially dangerous turn. I wonder if Hutchinson Heinemann was one of the mainstream publisher who rejected this book back when it was first written? Grainger (real name Robert Partridge) subsequently successfully self-published a whole series of novels featuring Detective Sergeant Smith, but now they are being reissued, with the full weight of a major publishing house in support.
Like God, publishing ‘moves in mysterious ways’, but this novel, with its thoughtful, serious and undemonstrative central character. made for good reading, and I hope it reaches a wider audience. The plot took an intriguing twist about half way through, and, with the case solved, there was a rather beautiful and poignant conclusion to the book. It will be available on 30th April.

April 26, 2026 0

FIVE SILVER SPOONS . . . Between the covers

This a classic revenge thriller. Not quite in The Count of Monte Cristo class, but pretty good. We start in June, and a young serviceman, on leave from his barracks, is cycling to his mother’s house when he is hit by a car. The five young undergraduates in the car leave him for dead, but he survives. Time is supposed to be a great healer, but some wounds remain open and fester.

We skip two decades, and now that man is out for vengeance. The five titular silver spoons have all prospered. In the order they are presented to us they have become a deeply respected surgeon, a supposedly Green media hustler, a university lecturer, a junior cabinet minister and a failed rock star (but very successful junkie). The latter receives a postcard of the Cambridge college he and his four friends attended. On the back is scrawled, “you’re first”. He is soon found dead. The other four occupants of the car on that fateful night have been sent a similar card, each inscribed, “who’s next?”

Author Sam Steele introduces us to DI Hope Fenton. If you were hoping to find a fictional senior copper who is happily married with a smoothly purring domestic background, you will have to look elsewhere. Hope is still married, by the skin of her teeth, to forensic scientist Adam, but he does most of the heavy lifting with their twins, while she prefers the solitude of her father’s barge on the Regent’s Canal.

Sam Steele, with an almost sadistic relish, ramps up the tension as each of the four potential victims slowly realises that the twenty five year-old chickens are coming home to roost. Meanwhile, Hope focuses on a Bulgarian criminal, Jack Garrett’s dealer, who she believes had a hand (and a baseball bat) in his death. She tries to do her job free of emotion and impulse, but sometimes her head is in a different place. The knowledge that her young son Noah was abducted several years ago while they were supermarket shopping, and had never been found, is like a malevolent tinnitus, constantly present and debilitating.

There’s a fatalistic 1830’s poem, known as Sounding Rafters. It has been set to music, and one quatrain reads,

“Stand! stand! to your glasses, steady!
Tis all we have left to prize;
One cup to the dead already–
Hurrah! for the next that dies!”

In this case, ‘the next that dies’ is university lecturer Alistair Monroe. Our as-yet-unnamed cyclist from the prologue has also been indulging in some serious blackmail. Ajay Desai, the surgeon, for example, has been siphoning off £500 a month from the savings account set up to pay for a £20K camper van trip around California for himself and family. Former ferocious criminal barrister and now Justice Secretary Lois Blackstock MP was the alpha member of the quintet back in the day, and she remains thus. She meets with the other two survivors – Desai and Gideon Makepeace, the renewables guru, and hatches a plan to fight back.

Just over a third of the way in, we realise that Sam Steele has been playing us, and rather cleverly. We learn that the blackmailer and the killer are not one and the same person. One is identified. He is Ross Livingstone, the odd man out on that corridor in St Giles College all those years ago. The misfit who was ridiculed. The English scholar whose ability dwarfed that of his five potentially high flying room-mates. Now, he lives in a dingy flat and sweeps up rubbish for the council in Gloucester. But is he the killer or the blackmailer?

Gideon Makepeace is murdered, and then Ajay Desai dies. Lois Blackstock is arrested, as DNA traces have been found at the murder sites implicating her. By this time, however, we know who the killer is, and it is a very clever twist inserted by the author into what is already a complex plot. Five Silver Spoons will be published by Allison & Busby on 23rd April.

April 19, 2026 0

A DECCA-BEATLES MOMENT?

I am not sure if this is a first, but it is, in my experience, unusual. Here we have an crime author who has been self publishing his novels for a decade, and now he has been taken on by a major publisher – Penguin Random House, no less. I know personally several authors who self-publish. Theirs is a labour of love, and I believe in most cases they do well to break even financially. I think the term ‘vanity publishing’ is rather unkind, as the term implies something that smacks of puffed-up pride, unjustified by any evidence of quality. Mainstream publishers, just like record companies back in the day when ‘records’ were a thing, are in the business to make money for themselves and their artists and writers. So did publishers back in 2015 have a Decca-Beatles moment with Peter Grainger?

I have yet to turn the first page of this book, first published in 2016, so I cannot say. So, who is Peter Grainger? For many years he taught English at a High School in Chatteris, a small town on the edge of Fenland. His real name is Robert Partridge, and after An Accidental Death came out in 2016, he soon realised that fans of the police procedural genre love a good series. Thus, the Kings Lake series was born. Kings Lake is apparently based on Kings Lynn, and I will be interested to see how the settings compare with how Jim Kelly treats the town in his Peter Shaw novels, of which I am a great fan. Anyone reading this might like to investigate other local writers Diane Calton Smith, Marie Tierney and Russell Wate. The reprint of An Accidental Death will be out on 30th April, and I will alert followers on Instagram, X, Facebook and Tiktok when my review goes live.

March 31, 2026 0

THE BARRAGE BODY . . . Between the covers

It is December, 1944, and we are in the Birmingham suburb of Erdington. Further afield, and quite unknown to both the residents of Erdington and the American soldiers shivering in their foxholes in the Ardennes Forest, Hitler is about to launch his last desperate gamble in what would come to be known as the Battle of The Bulge. In Erdington, war-wise, things are relatively quiet, but a barrage balloon unit, staffed by young women of that WAAF, is parked up at the Dunlop rubber factory, commonly known as Fort Dunlop.

It is here that Detective Chief Inspector Sam Mason is summoned, initially to investigate what appears to be a case of malicious communications, but things escalate rapidly. First it seems that someone has stolen vital blueprints for new and improved tyres for Lancaster bombers, and then, a body is discovered tethered to a barrage balloon which has unaccountably broken free.

Mason has a veritable 2000 piece jigsaw to put together. So many questions. Who was the man found dead in the barrage balloon cables? Why was jack-the-lad teenager Simon Samuels found in a similar position? What is the connection to Samuels’ father, a guard at a Staffordshire POW camp. Painstakingly, Mason and his redoubtable Sergeant O’Rourke have to move the pieces one by one until they begin to make a recognisable picture.

Sam Mason is quite unlike most British coppers in contemporary CriFi, partly because of the era in which was working. Because it is the 1940s we are quite content for him to rather stolid, happily married, prone to the aches and pains of late middle age. His deceptively gentle and slow-moving approach masks a sharp mind and a critical eye for detail. Here, he patiently absorbs the facts of a strange case, and delivers the goods.

This is the fourth Erdington Mystery. I enjoyed and reviewed the first of them, The Custard Corpses. The series couldn’t be more different from the books for which Porter is, perhaps, better known – dramatic swords, shields and helmets dramas from Saxon and Norman times. The books have one thing in common, however, and that is the setting – Mercia, the ancient kingdom we would now call The Midlands where, incidentally, Porter was born and brought up. The Barrage Body is original, inventive, nostalgic, absorbing, and I loved it. Published by MJ Publishing, it is available now.