Police Procedural

PREY . . . Between the covers

I have to confess that I haven’t read a crime novel written by a New Zealand writer since, years ago, I blitzed the Inspector Alleyn stories by Ngaio Marsh. Although she was born and died in Christchurch, those stories are quintessentially English. Vanda Symon, by contrast, has written a successful series featuring Dunedin cop Sam Shephard, and Prey is the latest of these. Sam has returned from maternity leave, and almost immediately the state of open war between herself and boss, DI Greg Johns, resumes. He immediately gives her a cold case to work on. Twenty five years earlier, a priest at St Paul’s Cathedral, was found dead at the foot of some stone stairs. He had been stabbed, but also had a broken neck. Despite every best effort, no-one was ever arrested for the murder. And there is a problem. The Reverend Mark Freeman had a teenage daughter, Felicity. And now she is married to DI Johns.

As Sam struggles to adjust being back at work, and worries about ‘abandoning’ baby daughter Amelia (for those who like that sort of thing the author spares us no detail of the baby’s rather spectacular digestive system) she realises she has been handed a poison chalice. The crime scene has since been walked over by tens of thousands of pairs of feet, and there are a mere handful of people alive now who were connected to the case at the time. These are, in no particular order:
Yvonne Freeman, the murdered man’s widow. She has terminal cancer.
Felicity Johns, née Freeman, now married to DI Greg Johns.
DI Johns himself was on the investigating team as a young police constable.
Brendan Freeman, Felicity’s brother.
Mel Smythe, a young youth worker at the time of the killing. She has since become estranged from the church, and has fallen on hard times.
Aaron Cox, of Maori origin, and a former criminal. Mark Freeman had worked hard to put him on the straight and narrow path.

When Sam goes to interview Mel Smythe (for the second time) she finds her dead – stabbed with a kitchen knife, which makes the case very much a current murder investigation. But is it – and if so, how – connected to the death of Mark Freeman? It has to be said that in the first few pages of the book, a female witness watches, from behind a church pillar, a struggle between two people, one of whom is the Reverend Mark Freeman. Make of that what you will.

Sam Shephard is a very human creation with none of the foibles and weaknesses that many British writers love to give their police detectives. She is a proud mum and loyal partner to little Amelia’s father, fellow copper Paul Frost. She has a keen brain and a healthy sense of humour, and it is her intuition that allows her to finally realise she has been lied to, and thus crack the case open. This only happens, however, in the final pages of the novel, and not before we are led up many a garden path. The connections to the case of DI Johns and his wife only make more hot coals for Sam to walk over, and she faces an unenviable task of doing her job without becoming badly burned.

Vanda Symon creates a convincingly clammy picture of a wet and wintry Dunedin, and at the centre of it all, glowering over the wrongdoings of its congregation, is the menacing Victorian Gothic bulk of St Paul’s Cathedral. In addition to the gripping plot, Symon explores those eternal ingredients of all good crime novels – money, greed, shame, blackmail, hypocrisy and family secrets. Prey is published by Orenda Books and is available now.

August 8, 2024 1

WHISPERS OF THE DEAD . . . Between the covers

Lin Anderson’s battle-hardened forensic investigator Dr Rhona MacLeod returns to make another journey through the grisly physical mayhem that some human beings inflict on others. In a disused and vandalised farmhouse in Glasgow’s Elder Park, a man’s body has been found. His eyes and mouth have been sewn shut and, strapped to a metal chair, he has been thrown through an upstairs window. A trio of teenage scallies have been using the old building as a base for their minor law-breaking, and they are the first people to see the body,

In another part of the city, an American film crew have informed the police that their leading man is missing. With the assistance of DS McNab, who has interviewed the movie-makers, Rhona MacLeod becomes involved, and wonders if the missing actor is the mutilated corpse found in the park.

At the very beginning of the book Lin Anderson introduces what develops into a parallel plot thread. A woman called Marnie Aitken has served six years in prison for the murder of her four year-old daughter, Tizzy, despite the fact that no trace of Tizzy, dead or alive, has ever been found. Marnie is known to Rhona MacLeod, and to her colleague, psychiatrist Professor Magnus Pirie. On her release, Marnie – abused as a child and as a young woman – is placed in sheltered accommodation. She goes missing. but not before sending a bizarre gift to Rhona. It is a beautifully sewn and knitted doll, in the likeness of a young Highland dancer. Rhona realises its significance, as Tizzy Aitken was a promising dancer, but she is also appalled to see that the doll’s lips have been sewn shut with black thread. What message is Marnie sending?

Marnie is located at her old cottage on the Rosneath Peninsula, and but she returns to Glasgow, where the police find that she is linked – albeit at a tangent – the the killing of the man in Elder Park. Meanwhile, DS McNab – who was involved in the original investigation into Tizzy’s disappearance, but kicked off the case – has realised that the script and screenplay of the film – now abandoned after the disappearance of its star – is inextricably tangled up with the murder.

Right from the beginning of the novel, we know that Marnie still talks to Tizzy, and Tizzy still talks to her. Is this merely, as Magnus Pirie suggests, a grieving woman’s way of coping with her loss? Or is it something else? On the first page of the book, Marnie looks out of the window:

“It was at that moment the figure of a girl, dressed in a kilt and blue velvet jacket, arrived to tramp across the snow in front of the main gate. As though sensing someone watching, the girl stopped and turned to look over at her. Marnie stood transfixed, then shut her eyes, her heart hammering. ‘She’s not real. It’s a waking nightmare. When I look again, she won’t be there.’
And she was right.
When Marnie forced her eyes open, the figure had gone, or more likely, it had never been there in the first place except there were footprints in the snow to prove otherwise.”

When Rhona visits Marnie’s seaside cottage, she walks down to the beach where Tizzy used to go with her mother:

“The snow at sea level had gone and the muddy ruts were studded with puddles and the shape of footsteps leading both ways. Her forensic eye noted three in particular, ranging in size: a small childlike print, a medium one and a large one, going in both directions.”

Lin Anderson doesn’t resolve this for us. She leaves us to draw our conclusions, and I suppose it depends on how feel about Hamlet’s oft-quoted words to Horatio in Act 1 Scene 5 of the celebrated play. The police procedural part of this novel plays out in the favour of the good guys, but aside from this, Lin Anderson has written a thoughtful and moving account of the nature of grief, and the indelible legacy that the death of a child bequeaths. Whispers of The Dead was published by Macmillan on 1st August.

August 5, 2024 1

BEYOND CLOSED DOORS . . . Between the covers

This enjoyable police procedural novel is the sixth in the series (to read reviews of the previous two, click this link) following the career of Norfolk copper Detective Chief Inspector Greg Geldard, his girlfriend Detective Sergeant Chris Mathews, and the rest of their team. These novels pretty much follow on from each other, and in the previous book Geldard battled a violent Lithuanian gangster called Constantin Gabrys. Now, it’s March 2020, Gabrys is serving a long prison sentence and his psychotic son is dead. However, all is not well, because a key figure in the case, now under witness protection has been attacked. He survived, but a police officer has been seriously injured, and it is obvious that the leak of information can only have come from within the police forced itself.

Despite the Gabrys empire having been apparently dismantled, their poisonous legacy hangs over Norfolk like a miasma. Norfolk, I hear you ask? Surely not that wonderful holiday destination with its abundant wildlife, historic homes and beautiful coastline? While the entire county might not be a wretched hive of scum and villainy, there are places – like Yarmouth and Gorleston – which suffer deep deprivation, and are consequently ripe feeding grounds for organised criminals, whether imported from Eastern Europe or of the home-grown variety.

Geldard traces the leak to a civilian police secretarial worker, but is dismayed to learn that part of the conspiracy involves Helen Gabrys, a member of the family he thought to have been as innocent of wrong doing as she was disgusted at her father’s career.

You will notice in the first paragraph that the story is set in March 2020. Remember that? As the country begins to shut down against the ravages of Covid, life just gets more difficult for Geldard and his team. Right across the criminal justice system things are starting to unravel. Court backlogs become years rather than months, prisons are struggling with absent staff, and the police themselves have to try to hold important conversations yards apart from each other. As the cover blurb suggests, however, the streets may be nearly empty, but evil is just as happy within four walls as out in public places.

There is a parallel thread in the story, which I found unsettling and hard to read. In Yarmouth live the Mirren family. Children Karen and Jake don’t have the happiest lives. Their mum is well-meaning, but weak, and browbeaten by her brutish husband. Karen has a place where she feels valued, can be herself and feel comfortable with trusted adults. It is her primary school, and when it shuts, forcing all the children to stay at home, it is a life sentence for the little girl. The reason this part of the novel affected me is that I taught in Norfolk for over thirty years, and for the latter part of that I led Safeguarding, and the scenes that Heather Peck describes were uncomfortably familiar.

When tragedy strikes in the Mirren house, the subsequent events become very much the concern of Greg Geldard, and he has to add a significant missing persons search to his mounting caseload. In the best traditions of great Victorian writers like Dickens and Hardy, who serialised their novels in popular magazines prior to publishing them in their entirety, Heather Peck leaves us on a knife edge, eagerly awaiting the next novel in this impressive series. Beyond Closed Doors was published by Ormesby Publishing on 22nd June.

July 17, 2024 1

BACK FROM THE DEAD . . . Between the covers

I have to confess that the crime fiction obsession with Scandi crime a decade ago came and went, as far as I was concerned. Some of it was very good, but to this old cynic it seemed that as long as an author had a few diacritic signs in their name, they were good for a publishing deal. Heresy, I know, but there we are. Back From The Dead is not a Scandi crime novel translated into English. The author (left) was born in Copenhagen, but has lived for many years in London, and she writes in English.

DI Henrick Jungerson is a Copenhagen cop, and his city is enduring a heatwave. This adds to his discomfort when he has to stand on the harbour side and watch a corpse being removed from the water. The body is not leaving its watery grave without a struggle. Jungerson, when he sees that the body is minus its head and hands realises that that wasn’t some poor fellow who fell into the water after imbibing too well during the interval of La Traviata at the nearby Opera House.

Jungerson ticks many of the boxes on the Classic CriFi Detective Inspector Checklist: he is middle aged, has a less than idyllic personal life, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. ‘Loose cannon, womaniser and too unorthodox‘ are just a few of the descriptions laid at his door. He has an on/off relationship with a journalist called Jensen. She works for Dagbladet, a Danish tabloid which is, like many print journals, struggling against the inexorable rise of digital media.

She has received a ‘phone call from Esben Norregaard, a national MP. His chauffeur and factotum, a Syrian immigrant called Aziz Almasi, has vanished from the face of the earth. Almasi’s wife is beside herself with worry. Jungerson and Jensen share information, and it seems possible that the harbour corpse might be that of Almasi. Both were huge men, built like the proverbial brick whatnot, and well over six and a half feet tall. The body fished from the harbour was also that of a very big man but despite the missing head, it is almost certainly not that of the missing Syrian. A burnt-out hire car seems to have been the vehicle which transported the unknown corpse to the water’s edge, but Jungerson is frustrated to learn that the name on the rental agreement, Christopher Michael White, was a ten year old British boy who died of a brain tumour twenty years earlier. Everything about the case seems to be going pear shaped. There is a glimmer of hope when a head is found dumped in a bin, but when the pathologist tells Jungerson that it did not belong to the harbour man, the detective feels like punching the wall.

The room or, more likely, the assembly hall, containing fictional Detective Inspectors is certainly crowded, but Henrik Jungersen stands out for his faults rather than for his triumphs. He is a good copper, for sure, but he is swept along by events rather than controlling the flow. This makes him all the more credible. It also ticks that vital box that asks the question of readers, “do you care what happens to him/her?” Yes, we do, and that’s what makes Back From The Dead such an entertaining read.

The title is something of a giveaway in terms of the fate of Aziz, but Heidi Amsinck steers the plot in an entirely unpredictable direction, as both Jungersen and Jensen have their lives – both professional and personal – turned upside down by the course of events. They are both swept along by the tide of a case neither can control, and this makes for a gripping and immersive police thriller. As is so often the case, the Bard of Avon can have the last word. There is, truly, something rotten in the state of Denmark.

Back From The Dead is published by Muswell Press and is available now.

April 18, 2024 0

REVENGE KILLING . . . Between the covers

I reviewed an earlier book in this series, Final Term, in January 2023 and thoroughly enjoyed it, so it was good to become reacquainted with York copper, DI Geraldine Steel. Revenge Killing is a little bit different in that DI Steel is off on maternity leave. As much as she loves baby Tom, she is feeling very much out of the loop in terms of her police career. When her friend and colleague DI Ariadne Moralis asks for her advice, she leaps at the chance to help.

Moralis has a complete puzzle of a case on her hands. Initially, her husband – Greek, like Ariadne – has been visited by a friend and compatriot called Yiannis Karalis. Yiannis owns a property where one of the tenants – a small time drug dealer called Jay Roper – has been found dead at the foot of the stairs leading up to his flat. Ariadne assures him that he has nothing to worry about, but when the post mortem examination reveals that Jay was suffocated, things become more complicated.

Ariadne discovers that Yiannis is something of a fugitive, as he fled Greece during the fallout from the murder of his older brother and a subsequent vengeance death. Did he visit Jay to remonstrate with him about the drug dealing? Did the visit turn violent. One of Jay’s girlfriends, Lauren Shaw, has gone missing. What does she know? Another girlfriend, Carly, who works in what is euphemistically known as a gentleman’s club, is located, and she is completely antagonistic towards the police. Despite claiming that she and Jay had an ‘open’ relationship, was jealousy simmering just below the surface, and did she kill Jay on the grounds that if she couldn’t have him, no-one else would?

Leigh Russell cleverly lets us spend some time with Lauren, who has panicked. We know. from the early pages of the book that she and Jay had a blazing row which ended in him falling down the stairs. Now, terrified that the police will blame her for his death, she goes on the run, and we share her misery as she her meagre savings run out, and she discovers that life on the streets is miserable and dangerous.

Revenge Killing is, at its heart, an excellent and engaging police procedural, but Leigh Russell has an intriguing little subtext ticking away in the background, and it centres on Geraldine’s misgivings about her life trajectory. She dutifully attends a mothers and toddlers group, but feels only alienation:

“But the other mothers at the toddler group had never dealt with murder investigations in the real world. None of them had watched a post-mortem, knowing the cold flesh on the slab had once been a living breathing human being, whose life had been snatched away by someone in the grip of an evil passion. The other mothers had never learned to close their minds to the horrors of every day human brutality, so shock couldn’t prevent them from doing the job. Gazing at the cheerful faces around her, she regretted her choice of career and wished her life could be as simple as it was for the other women in the room. But her experience had cut her adrift from these chattering young women, with their sheltered upbringing and cosseted lives. They discussed their various tribulations as the infants crawled or toddled around the room, or sat propped up watching warily, like Tom.”

As with all good whodunnits, we are presented with just the right blend of surprise at the identity of the killer, and a few helpful nudges to point us in the right direction. Revenge Killing is published by No Exit Press and is available now.

April 1, 2024 1

CITY ON FIRE . . . Between the covers

In all my 76 years, I have never visited Brighton. Nothing personal, but I have never had a reason to go there. As a locus for crime novels it is certainly up there with its not-so-near northern neighbour, London. It probably all started with the evil doings of Charles ‘Pinky’ Hale in Graham Greene’s classic 1938 novel. In more recent times Peter James, with his Roy Grace series, has dispelled any notion that the resort is a happy and cheerful place of innocent fun, handkerchief hats, deck chairs and donkey rides. In a totally different vein, the Colin Crampton novels written by another Peter – this time Bartram – have hinted at a less malevolent Brighton in the 1960s.

Graham Bartlett’s Brighton is simply foul. Drug addicts from all over the country huddle in their rancid blankets in shop doorways. In summer, the warm breezes from the south still entice Londoners to take the trains from Victoria, and the shingle beaches still remain attractive. Walk just a hundred yards or so from the promenade, however, and you come face to face with the unique dangers generated by shattered human lives colliding with the vicious criminals who provide the drugs on which their victims have become reliant.

When Ged, a Liverpudlian undercover cop briefed to penetrate the Brighton drug scene announces that, after this current job, he is looking forward to a spell of paternity leave to welcome his firstborn, it is an obvious ‘tell’. You don’t need to have a PhD in contemporary crime fiction to know that this means he is not long for this world. He gets on the wrong side of Sir Ben Parsons, a Brighton legend, and a man who has worked his way from the metaphorical barrow boy to be CEO of an international pharmaceutical giant. Parsons’ latest money spinner is Synthopate, a drug that replicates the peaceful oblivion of heroin, but has no need of drug cartels, murderous enforcers, and street trash addicts.

Chief Superintendent Jo Howe has a dog in this fight. Her sister Caroline is not long dead, a victim of her opiate addiction. She is spearheading an initiative to get as many addicts as possible off the street , cleaned up, and into rehab. It is working well, but it is the last thing that Parsons wants, as it will hit the sales of Synthopate. Parsons has powerful friends everywhere – in politics, business, the media – and even the police. Together with Brighton crime boss Tony Evans, he starts to target the police officers themselves, and their families. All of a sudden, officers are calling in sick, becoming unavailable for court cases and showing a marked reluctance to volunteer for extra duties. Howe is furious but then it hits her world, too. Her journalist husband Darren is arrested by the Metropolitan Police for alleged corruption, and he looks to be facing serious jail time.

Things get even worse. Service companies employed by Sussex police – court staff, mortuaries, vehicle maintenance – all suddenly become unavailable – and there is a killer blow. Jo Howe’s two young sons go into convulsions after eating their school packed lunches and are on life support. There is a trope which suggests that there is no more dangerous being in creation than a mother when she realises her children’s lives are threatened. So it is here. Jo Howe becomes a blistering force of nature, and in a literally explosive finale she saves her sons, her own career – and ends the malevolent reign of Ben Parsons and Tony Evans.

One of the trademarks of the great film director Roger Corman (and he is still with us, aged 97) was to end his Hammer films with a fire – mansion, castle, cottage, it didn’t matter. Graham Bartlett makes a nod in his direction at the end of this book. Good prevails in the end, but the author paints a picture of a police force and justice system that is just a few malign keystrokes away from dystopia – and we should all be very worried. City On Fire is published by Allison & Busby and is available now.

March 30, 2024 0

LAYING OUT THE BONES . . . Between the covers

Kate Webb introduced us to DI Matt Lockyer and DC Gemma Broad in Stay Buried, which I read, reviewed and found most impressive. Briefly, Lockyer is a single man, son of Wiltshire farmers – who would be described as ‘hard-scrabble’ in America. His younger brother, Chris, was murdered in a street brawl a few years earlier. He is involved – at a distance – with Hedy Lambert, a woman whose murder conviction he helped overturn. She still served over a decade in prison.

Because of a previous professional misjudgment, Lockyer has been sidelined into cold-case crimes. One such is the death of Holly Gilbert who fell – or was pushed – from a bridge into the path of a an HGV. Now, the remains one of the men suspected as having being involved, and who disappeared shortly after, have been discovered on Salisbury Plain. Lee Geary was a giant of a man, superficially very scary with his height, skinhead hair and tattoos, but he was simple in mind and spirit and his criminal convictions were all for minor and non violent crimes.

Three other twenty-somethings who were suspected of being involved in the death of Holly’s death have all since died in ambiguous circumstances. Lockyer has much on his mind. His mother lies dangerously ill in hospital, infected by a Covid variant, while his father struggles to keep the farm going. Lockyer lives in – and is slowly renovating – an old cottage, but he discovers that something horrific happened within its walls decades ago and, as is often the case, the past can often rear its ugly head to disrupt the relative tranquility of the present. I’ll give you a teaser – the book’s title is shared with another of the same name. If you take the trouble to Google, you will discover a rather delicate and elegant connection.

In trying to find out the truth about Lee Geary’s death, Lockyer is drawn, as if pulled by a magnet, to Old Hat Farm. It is owned by Vincent and Trish O’Neill, who lead something of an alternative life. They are are almost archetypal ‘hippies’, with lives organised around the ancient festivals such as Samhain and Beltain. Fellow seekers after truth are welcome at the farm but, unfortunately all of the key residents had lives in the real world, and it is their misdeeds in their previous lives which make up the puzzle Lockyer and Broad have to solve.

The novel is lovingly set in a part of England that the the author clearly knows well, and Lockyer’s intimate connection with the landscape – the vastness of Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire’s ancient sites and old trackways – brings a literary sense of place that was deployed so well by Thomas Hardy, but has been used by more recent writers in the crime genre such as Jim Kelly and Phil Rickson. As locals will know, the ravages caused by military training are brutal scars on the old fields and byways, but they are what they are.

Laying Out The Bones is not just a superior police procedural novel, but a powerful evocation of how historic lies and misjudgments can return to plague those involved. The empathy between Lockyer and Broad is utterly convincing, as is the awareness of what happened to us all during the Covid outbreak. The book’s plot is intricate, but beautifully fashioned, and although Matt Lockyer has something of a shock in the last page, I am sure he will survive to feature in a future episode of his career story. Published by Quercus, this book is available now.

February 28, 2024 0

DEADLY ANIMALS . . . Between the covers

The district of Rubery, on the edge between Birmingham and Worcestershire. 1981. Ava Bonney is thirteen years old, She lives with her mum and sisters in a rudimentary council flat. Her dad has flown the coop, but mum Colleen has a feckless boyfriend, Trevor. Ava is an unusual girl. She is fascinated with animal physiology, and absorbs information mostly from books, but also – on the rare occasions when her fellow pupils are not being disruptive – from science lessons at school.

Ava is startlingly intelligent, but also wise enough to disguise herself as an ordinary teenager when needs must. She has an unusual hobby. She collects roadkill – mostly small mammals – and she takes them to secret sites close to her home, and installs them in little shrines. She secretly visits these special places as the remains decompose, and records her observations in a notebook. The largest specimen she has collected is a fox, but when she sneaks out one night to examine it, she has an unpleasant surprise. The smell of putrefaction is far more pungent than she would have expected, but the reason is obvious. Just a couple of yards from the dead fox is the body of a local schoolboy who went missing a couple of weeks earlier.

Not the least of Ava’s skills is a talent for mimicry, and she disguises her voice as that of a well educated middle-aged woman to make a 999 call, reporting what she has found. Another body is found, and then a third boy disappears. By this time, after interviewing local youngsters who knew the boys, Detective Sergeant Seth Delahaye has his suspicions that ‘Miss Misty’, the caller nicknamed after the anonymous woman in the 1971 Clint Eastwood film, is none other than Ava. Given the nature of the wounds inflicted on the boys the police are, despite common sense and experience, coming close to believing that they might be seeking a ‘what’ rather than a ‘who.’

Ava, with the help of her friend John, begins to put together a theory about what might be happening, and she believes that there is a connection to an elderly man – a former farmer and dog breeder – who is languishing in a care home with dementia. Delahaye, meanwhile, is receiving strange and disturbing reports of a large unidentified animal being seen at night in several places. As the police and Ava – in their different ways, close in on the killer, they realise that the truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

In Ava, Marie Tierney has created one of the most startling and original characters in modern crime fiction. I suppose she is a savant, but her gifts are not the result of her being on any kind of autism spectrum. She is super-smart, but also sensitive to the needs and natures of other people.

This is an astonishing novel on so many levels. It combines horror, compassion, dark humour, narrative verve, a deeply embedded empathy with landscape and locale and – above all – Ava Bonney, a truly memorable creation. Deadly Animals is published by Bonnier Books and is available now.

February 25, 2024 0

THE WINTER VISITOR . . . Between the covers

I wasn’t sure if I should tag this review as ‘historical crime fiction.’ The novel certainly takes us back to a 1991 England of Ford Sierras, four-star petrol, Spurs being managed by Terry Venables and captained by Gary Mabbutt. Perma-press slacks from C&A and – on the telly – the brief wonder that was BSKYB. We are in and around the town of Colchester in Essex, and we are in one of those winters where it always used to snow. I am sure that there is a doctorate waiting to be written on why Essex is perceived to Britain’s Crime Central. Perhaps it might be to do with the White House Farm murders in Tolleshunt D’Arcy, the ‘Essex Boys’ murder at Rettendon, or the exploits of double murderer James Fairweather in Colchester.

In The Winter Visitor, James Henry echoes his love of ornithology by using the term used for birds who fly to Britain during the winter – among them Redwings, Fieldfares, and both Bewick’s and Whooper Swans. I reviewed an earlier James Henry novel with an avian title, Whitethroat, back in 2020, and you can read the review here.

Two birds of very different feather are Detective Sergeants Daniel Kenton and Julian Brazier, based in Colchester. Kenton is married, bespectacled and fairly civilised:

“Daniel Kenton stared blankly into the hairdresser’s mirror. He did not care to see himself as others surely would: a a weary man, with murky red eyes, closing in on thirty five but aged beyond his years.”

Brazier, however, is frequently uncouth, ostensibly insensitive, and with the dress sense of someone preening himself in a Southend pound shop.

“Brazier was in a green bomber jacket and baggy black trousers like Charlie Chaplin, with white trainers poking out the bottom of them. Pegged trousers with turn-ups as well – on such short a leg as Brazier’s they were not at all flattering.”

As a pair, though, they are extremely effective. They need to be. James Henry has presented us with an extremely complex murder case.

Bruce Hopkins, an Essex criminal – not a major gangster, but more of a conman who dabbled in the drugs business – returns from the Spanish hideaway he shares with many other dodgy British expats, but it is a huge mistake. He is kidnapped, shoved into the boot of a Sierra (what else) which is rolled into a reservoir. When the car and body are discovered Kenton and Brazier are assigned to the case, and it is a complex one.

Hopkins did not have a criminal history likely to provoke Mafia-style revenge, so there seems to be no point in rounding up ‘the usual suspects’. Even so, Kenton is despatched to Marbella to interview former Essex bad boys, but he returns literally clueless. There is also a current investigation into an arson attack on a local church, and it is that Kenton and Brazier get the first hint of a breakthrough when they begin to suspect that Hopkins’s death may be linked to a small preparatory school called Bryde Park and some of its former staff and pupils.

James Henry is a very good writer. He captures the period perfectly, and his appreciation of the nature of Essex’s relationship with London is acute:

“Billericay, South Essex. Home of the East Ender made good. Traders, jobbers, grafters on the stock market. Leave school in May at fifteen, straight on the train into Liverpool Street towards plum jobs with brokers in the city, pulling in wedge before their smarter ‘O’ Level classmates finish in the exam hall.”

Kenton and Brazier have to visit an old fashioned mental hospital in the course of the investigation, and Henry captures its menace:

“…the institution itself had teetered on the fringe of an archaic medical world best forgotten. At the forefront of experimental medicine in the fifties, the place was synonymous with lobotomies, padded cells, terrifying screams, and all the nightmares associated with the restraint of insanity.”

We are lead this way and that as we share the detectives’ struggles to make sense of the death of Bruce Hopkins. The solution is as unexpected as it is elegant, and this is superior crime fiction. Published by Riverrun/Quercus, it is available now.

February 20, 2024 0