Description:
The police procedural, when at its best, is the most satisfying and reassuring subgenre in the mystery field: the painstaking process of clues and questioning stills our primal fears about crime. But making the police as interesting as the procedure is difficult, and most books in this field fail at the human level: the coppers are either too dull to spend any time with or so flashy that they steal away our attention from the details. That's why Scotland's Peter Turnbull has quietly become the best in the business. His detectives at P Division in Glasgow are a credible mixture of wisdom and humanity, doing the dog work and coming up with the occasional flashes of insight that open new doors. To slow down identification of the body, Turnbull's 11th book opens with the discovery of a man with his face blown off. But Sergeant Ray Sussock, bone weary and ready for retirement, recognizes the clothes as those given released prisoners after lengthy sentences. This narrows the search to men just let out, because nobody would keep that outfit any longer than necessary. A short scene, as Sussock retrieves some winter clothes of his own from the home of his ex-wife and openly gay son, fills out our understanding of the man. We then watch his pain deepen when a well-meaning senior officer sends the exhausted Sussock out on one mission too many. Similar moments move the case along and give the detectives subtly distinct personalities. By pushing just the right ego buttons on an antiques dealer, one officer links the murdered man to a suspicious fire and insurance fraud. Another policeman, disturbed by his wife's odd behavior when he stays home later than usual one morning, gets a clue to her actions while meeting with his superior on another matter. Two detectives with adjacent desks profit from an overheard telephone request. Turnbull conducts his police officers like a good orchestra, and the result is a richly tuneful story. --Dick Adler
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