Police Procedural

KILLING ON THE NORFOLK BROADS . . . Between the covers

I have come to enjoy Heather Peck’s Greg Geldard mysteries, and you can read reviews of earlier novels in the series by clicking this link. Yes, Geldard is just one of scores of fictional English coppers vying for our attention as CriFi readers, but the books are well written and the main characters are totally convincing. There is probably a PhD out there somewhere analysing fictional murder locations within the English counties but, quite unscientifically, I suggest that Norfolk would be high on the list. In addition to the Geldard series we have, in no particular order, the Peter Shaw novels of Jim Kelly, the Ruth Galloway mysteries by Elly Griffiths and the recently re-published DS David Smith storied by Peter Grainger.

For the avoidance of doubt, this book may have a rural setting but cosy crime it most certainly is not. Inquisitive old ladies, bumbling vicars and bucolic police constables are noticeable by their absence. Instead we have the skeleton of a woman discovered in an abandoned farmhouse. She is roped to a chair and has been dead for, perhaps, three years. Nearby is a cupboard full of sex toys and, in an adjacent bedroom, there are walk to wall mirrors. Geldard believes this is the stage setting for a snuff movie. His forensic advisors believe that the skull, found beside the chair, was severed while the victim was still alive.

The dead woman is eventually identified as that of a Ukranian film student who somehow found her way into the darker fringes of that particular art form. Diligent investigative work reveals a currently live victim of these perverted film-makers. She is located, and is found on a leaky semi-abandoned cabin cruiser hidden away on an isolated spur of one of the Norfolk Broads.

Here’s what may seem to be an odd analogy. I used to be an enthusiastic angler, and our fishing reels had a kind of clutch which, when playing a big fish, allowed a certain amount of line to be paid out, tiring the fish, but smoothly enough not to cause a line snap. So it is here. Geldard and his team have their quarry hooked, but reeling in their prey requires subtlety, patience and determination. With enquiries ranging from North London HMOs to villages in Ukraine ravaged by the Chernobyl disaster, the purveyors of this most despicable of entertainments are brought to justice.

One of the many joys of this book is that Heather Peck avoids narrative tricks which, in my opinion, disfigure too many modern crime novels. There are no flashbacks, no flash-forwards, and none of the ‘six weeks earlier’ chapters which I have come to know and hate. What we have here is terrific storytelling, intelligent writing, and a thoroughly immersive read. I was particularly delighted that the rather happy ending was graced by someone singing The Parting Glass, an evocative old Scottish song which, in younger days, I sang many times. Killing On The Norfolk Broads will be published by Joffe Books on 22nd September.

September 21, 2026 0

SECRETS ON THE FELLS . . . Between the covers

Whatever sights the silent stones of Fountains Abbey had witnessed over the centuries from its creation by the Normans to its ruination by Henry VIII, a butchered corpse was probably not among their number. But when Yorkshire cops Di Leo Donovan and DC Shan Young are called out to the stately ruins one bitter winter night, that is just what they find. Patrick Armitage, college lecturer, his body ravaged by knife wounds, his lips frozen in the rictus of death, had been on site earlier, directing the dress rehearsal of a musical.

Now, with all the actors, singers and technicians long gone, he lies dead, with the arterial spray from his wounds staining one of the ancient pillars of the nave. Donovan and Young are an interesting pair. Donovan, much Young’s senior, is beginning to feel the onset of arthritis, but has other pains, the principle one being that of the shattered relationship with Luke, his son, who is doing prison time for a hate crime, brought to light by his father’s diligence. Young is of Chinese heritage with adoptive parents, and is in a same sex relationship. She and her partner have one failed IVF pregnancy behind them, but they hope for better things.

As is often the way with police procedurals, early suspects seem to be eliminated for one reason or another, and the investigation stalls. Donovan likens the process to one of those fairground grab machines where the prize seems almost in reach before the claws slip and close on thin air. In murder fiction, families are rarely what they seem to be, and so it is here. Armitage’s brother Max is a drunk, obsessed with pursuing an ever-more-elusive fortune by dabbling in crypto currency. And is Bree, Armitage’s wife, the distraught widow she seems to be?

The investigation takes a dramatic turn when a teenage girl, Rosie, one of the stars of the now abandoned musical goes missing. Donovan and Young have discovered that some years earlier, Armitage had been involved, apparently innocently, with a female student, Janelle, who had developed a huge crush on him. Is the disappearance of Rosie history repeating itself? Did the charismatic – and handsome – college lecturer somehow fall foul of yet another teenage obsession?

In some ways, this novel is nothing out of the ordinary in the genre, in that the procedural details are convincing, and the main characters are well drawn. For me, however, the stand-out quality is the vibrancy of the setting; the towering and gaunt majesty of the ruined abbey, the sharp frosts making the tall grasses sparkle on the wintry lanes, and the sheer endurance of the local limestone in the old farms and field walls. Against this backdrop, Cath Staincliffe has written a crime novel which involves readers from the very first paragraph and keeps us guessing until the very end.

I don’t use the star system on my site for the reason that it is too blunt a tool, and I prefer to convey my views with more nuance. Commercial sites like Amazon, Netgalley and Goodreads do have the star system, and I generally play safe and award three or four. Here, though, I will be going for five. In addition to the wonderful topographical background, Cath Staincliffe mines deep into human joy and sorrow. Donovan’s heartbreak at the total breakdown of his the relationship with his son, Young’s paralysing anxiety over her own identity and the health of her adoptive father, and the devastating effects of violent crime on families – each is described unflinchingly, but with a huge sense of compassion. Secrets On The Fells is published by Joffe Books and available now.

September 17, 2026 0

THE INFORMER . . . Between the covers

Authors, often unwittingly, can be prescient in what they write. Urban riots in Britain are, thankfully infrequent but, as I write this review, the headlines about the disturbances in Middlesborough following the death of two police officers are beginning to recede. Here, in Hafton, a fictional northern city which could well be Hull, DCI John Blizzard is wiping the grit from his eyes after several nights directing the police response to violent disorder on a sink estate euphemistically christened The Willows, but commonly known as The Spur.

On The Spur there are neither Willows, Meadows, Brooks, Glades nor any other of the other fatuously improbable terms used by town planners to name cheap housing estates. Instead, The Spur is home to broken families, feral youths and a violent hatred of any kind of authority. I am old and very grey, if not full of sleep, and the horrors of the digital age never fail to appall me, and here Blizzard encounters an abomination known as Grief Tech.

AI enables dead loved ones to be recreated, revoiced, and their lives re-enacted on video. John Dean is writing fiction, of course, but can it be that something so awful is now ‘a thing’? The mother of a police officer, Kenny Jarvis, slain on The Spur years earlier, is sucked into such a scheme, known as Second Chance, and tries to convince Blizzard that her dead son, via his AI reincarnation, has vital clues to the identity of the man dubbed ‘The Orchestrator’, believed to be planning and directing the violence on The Spur. Blizzard is a bluff and uncompromising old fashioned copper who is unashamedly baffled by the acceleration of technology in law enforcement, but when his more enlightened colleagues expose Second Chance as a multi-million bitcoin money laundering agency, he is delighted at their work, but still unsure of how this is connected to the appalling violence emanating from The Spur.

He is equally baffled by what connects the ancient parish church of St Andrew’s to the unrest, and cannot see that its almost complete destruction by arson is linked to the lowlife criminals who are on the rampage night after night. And why are the earnest evangelical Christians from the Love Foundation connected to the mayhem? I always try to avoid spoilers, so suffice it say that someone who appears to be ‘holier than thou’ is at the centre of the villainy.

Also, it is reassuring to meet a senior copper like Blizzard who is not always the best judge of character. This is not a criticism of the novel which was, in turn, gripping, entertaining and fast-paced, but I do wonder why crime writers bother to invent fictional cities. I feel much more at home reading a novel if I know it is set in Leeds, Oxford, Cambridge, Peterborough, Manchester, London, or Bristol. I can understand it when writers create fictional villages; real villages have relatively tiny populations and easily identified buildings, but large urban conurbations? As ever, I am happy to hear your views. There is a contact form on the website, but my immediate email is dprestidge@yahoo.com The Informer is published by Joffe Books and is available now.

September 10, 2026 0

WHAT THE DYING SEE . . . Between the covers

Manchester. The present day. The central character is DI Thomas Ridpath, and member of the Major Incident Team (MIT), who doubles as Coroner’s Officer. He is a widower with a teenage daughter about to face her GCSEs. We learn right from the start that a serial killer is at large. He specialises in a warped version of Assisted Dying, and injects his elderly victims with fatal doses of pain relieving drugs. We know this. The police have no idea.

Central to the narrative is Margaret Challinor, the Coroner. She has returned to work after being debilitated by a savage random assault, which resulted in her being in a coma for many weeks. She has recovered. But has she? Thundering headaches suggest that all is not well, but she is a formidable woman, and battles on through the pain.

MJ Lee clearly has experience of being the subject of word-salad management speak. Here, a new commander (recently promoted from Traffic) gives the team an inspirational address:

“The Chief has asked me to bring managerial systems and competence to the organisation of the solution of crimes, to be data-driven in this age of AI, computers and complex analytics, an approach that builds on our core competences and resilience, but takes advantage of the sizeable opportunities afforded by this new technology and analytics to create a force that is forward-thinking, creative rather than reactive, one that uses its resources to the limits of their capabilities to serve the people of Manchester, ensuring they feel secure and protected as they go about their daily lives.”

Ridpath is resolute, persistent, and no-one”s fool. Those three qualities make him a thorn in the side of his pusillanimous senior managers who are bitterly resentful that a spreadsheet macro cannot bring to justice the person who is taking such obvious delight in ending the lives of Ill and vulnerable old people. Ridpath’s dogged attention to detail closes the case, but not before his own life is put on the line.

Apart from his scathing caricature of Ridpath’s boss and his oleagenous lanyard – class pomposity, MJ Lee doesn’t preach or wave any particular banner. The story – an excellent police procedural – did make me wonder about the overly politicised leadership of our police forces. I am not a Londoner, but the replacement of the ineffectual Cressida Dick with the operational paralysis induced by Mark Rowlands is a case in point. It you can hear my sigh of impotent despair, then it will be momentary. This particular rant is for another day. What The Dying See is published by Canelo and is out now.

July 7, 2026 0

THE CLIFF’S EDGE MURDERS . . . Between the covers

I’ll be upfront and say that I loved this book from the very first page. There were two initial reasons, the first being that it is set in my favourite county of Shropshire, a place where I spent happy years, and somewhere that remains a repository of golden memories. Secondly, joy of joys, it has a simple and uncluttered chronological narrative, with none of the contrived ‘two years earlier’ or ‘six months later’ chapter headings so much in vogue with some authors.

Priscilla Masters sets Shrewsbury coroner Martha Gunn and DI Alex Randall a grim problem to solve. Two teenage joyriders have died when their stolen car dives headlong off the edge of a steep disused quarry. As the police are cleaning up the scene, they pop the boot, and find the emaciated corpse of an elderly woman. And a third boy, who may well have been in the car, is nowhere to be found.

Martha Gunn and Alex Randall are complex but attractive characters. Gunn was widowed some years earlier, and brought up her twins Sam and Sukey while balancing the demands of her job. After a career in sport that didn’t quite work out, Sam is now at university, while Sukey is well-known actress in a popular TV soap. Randall’s back story has an element of tragedy, too. His wife, Erica, died after falling downstairs. She was an unstable woman, and their marriage was unhappy. For a while, the circumstances of her death were considered suspicious, but Randall was cleared of any culpability. The couple had a child, but Christopher died shortly after birth, of a genetic defect.

The missing teenage joy rider is eventually found, and he confesses that they had been taking the car – which belonged to their deceased tutor at a local college – out for illicit drives for some time, but it wasn’t until they opened the boot to find a foot pump that they discovered the body. Panicking, and convinced they would be blamed for her death, they decided to dump it at Clive Quarry, but it went disastrously wrong. The surviving boy, Sol Raintree, managed to jump out of the back seat before it plummeted down the badly eroded cliff side.

The body of the elderly woman, tagged with generic name Jane Doe, poses seemingly unanswerable questions. Why was she kept in a cold place – but not frozen – before she was put in the boot of the car? Who had dyed her hair, and painted her nails, and made a loving professional job of both? Why does her broken femur, an accident which occurred not long before she died, not show up on any contemporary medical records?

I am not normally a huge fan of romantic entanglements between investigating officers in crime novels, but Priscilla Masters handles the growing relationship between Gunn and Randall with the lightest of touches. As I hinted earlier, I loved the Shropshire setting, and many of the topographical references chimed with me, in particular the powerful presence of The Severn, deceptively beautiful but also a powerful bringer of destruction when in flood. There is also the occasional hint of the ‘blue remembered hills’, and it was pleasant to be reminded of places like Baschurch and Church Stretton.

The author keeps us waiting for some time before she delivers a beautifully complex but elegantly credible solution to a puzzling death. Jane Doe finally gets a real name, the dignity of a funeral, and a mourner. The Cliff’s Edge Murders will be published by Joffe Books on 25th June.

June 23, 2026 0

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.