Persons Unknown by Susie Steiner

From the publisher: In this brilliant crime novel from the author of Missing, Presumed, a detective investigates her most personal case yet: a high-profile murder in which her own family falls under suspicion.

Persons Unknown is the second book in Susie Steiner’s police procedural mystery series. The lead character is a detective, pregnant through artificial insemination, who has recently moved to provide a better life for her adopted black son Fly. Then the father of her sister’s toddler is murdered, and Fly becomes the main suspect when he is seen on camera walking home from school near where the man was killed. The evidence is flimsy and circumstantial, but Manon’s colleagues seem to be working against her as she tries to prove Fly’s innocence.

Steiner is a good writer, and I wanted to see where the case was going and how Manon was going to cope with pregnancy while striving to clear her son’s name. Manon is messy and imperfect, and while I don’t always like her I appreciate that she seems like a real person.

The plot was inspired by a real case. While I fully believe young black man are falsely accused and even convicted on weak evidence, I did have a hard time fully buying that the adopted 12-year-old-son of a white police officer would be railroaded in quite the way that Fly is in this book.  Still, like the first book (Missing, Presumed), Persons Unknown is a definite recommend from me for lovers of British police procedurals.

I read an advance reader copy of Persons Unknown. It will be released in early July and will be available at the Galesburg Public Library as a print book and an ebook. 

Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner

From the publisher: At thirty-nine, Manon Bradshaw is a devoted and respected member of the Cambridgeshire police force, and though she loves her job, what she longs for is a personal life. Single and distant from her family, she wants a husband and children of her own. One night, after yet another disastrous Internet date, she turns on her police radio to help herself fall asleep—and receives an alert that sends her to a puzzling crime scene. Edith Hind—a beautiful graduate student at Cambridge University and daughter of the surgeon to the Royal Family—has been missing for nearly twenty-four hours. Her home offers few clues: a smattering of blood in the kitchen, her keys and phone left behind, the front door ajar but showing no signs of forced entry. Manon instantly knows that this case will be big—and that every second is crucial to finding Edith alive. … Suspenseful and keenly observed, Missing, Presumed is a brilliantly twisting novel of how we seek connection, grant forgiveness, and reveal the truth about who we are.

Things were off to a great start when Missing, Presumed opened with a quote from a T.S. Eliot poem. This police procedural is not really so much about the mystery of the missing girl but about how her friends, her family, and the police react to her disappearance. There is a lot of character development, and the characters are messy and imperfect.

The author is not afraid to show her main characters in an unattractive light. Manon gets conjunctivitis and doesn’t take care of it for several days, and her eye becomes more and more inflamed and ugly. She sleeps with men on first dates just to get rid of them, and she cries a lot. When she is in a relationship, she is needy and impatient. But I warmed to Manon right off when I learned she can only fall asleep to the sounds of her police radio.

I found most of the characters interesting – the missing girl is about the least interesting – and I enjoyed the author’s writing style. I felt immersed in the lives of the police officers and their investigation. Some plot twists surprised me and some did not. Missing, Presumed is a definite recommend from me for lovers of British police procedurals. I think readers will want to see more of Manon and crew. I know I do.

I read an advance reader copy of Missing, Presumed. It will be published in late June and will be available at the Galesburg Public Library. 

Publisher description: "When Gabriel Ash's wife and kids were kidnapped four years ago by Somali pirates, his life spiraled out of control. He left his job working for the British government and moved to a small town where he descended into near madness. But with the help of his dog, Patience, and his friendship with young police officer Hazel Best, his focus returned. So when he discovers that his wife is still alive, Ash is once again filled with hope and fear. Hope that he has another chance to find her and their two young sons; fear that, in trying, he may bring about their deaths."

One thing I like about Jo Bannister is that she excels at drawing emotional relationships between members of the opposite sex who are not romantic pairs. This is brilliantly displayed in Desperate Measures, the third book in the Gabriel Ash/Hazel Best series.

Desperate Measures is full of plot twists, okay, not all entirely plausible, but the story kept me guessing and I thoroughly enjoyed it. At one point I actually had to skip ahead because something happened that I both believed and could not believe.

I love the character of Gabriel Ash, the depiction of his struggle to cope with his PTSD, and his ability to hear his white lurcher Patience speak. (Patience is a great character too.) I also like that Gabriel is clever and intelligent but not a James Bond type. ("He had never been licensed to kill. He'd never been licensed to shout loudly or carry a pointed stick. He was a desk jockey - always had been, always would have been until he took his pension and the CBE that went with it. ... He was the kind of man who apologized to people who bumped into him in shop doorways." (p. 216))

If you like English police procedurals with lots of character development, I recommend all of Jo Bannister's series. If you also  are drawn to depictions of characters with PTSD, so much the better as far as the Gabriel Ash/Hazel Best series goes. Can't wait for the next book in the series!

The Galesburg Public Library has many books by Jo Bannister in multiple formats. The first book in the Gabriel Ash/Hazel Best series is Deadly Virtues.

The Kill by Jane Casey

Wow, this series just keeps getting better! The Kill is the fifth book in Jane Casey's Maeve Kerrigan series, and it was a nail biter for me, with a great plot and twists I didn’t see coming. Cops are being killed, seemingly at random. The premise made me think quite a bit about what’s going on in the United States right now.

Jane Casey’s real strength is character development, and I was legitimately worried about what was going to happen to some of the main characters in this series while reading The Kill. Although, like many police procedurals, this one features a romantic relationship for the main character, it was not the focus. Maeve’s significant other Rob was hardly in The Kill. But the other two men in her life were front and center.

There is Superintendent Charles “God” Godley, her boss, who has a fine reputation but has been feeding information to a criminal for years and no one but Maeve knows it. Godley is finally starting to crack under the strain. Then there is Detective Inspector Josh Derwent, her sexist pig of a coworker who has surprising depth and strength. The relationship between Josh and Maeve has been stretched and beaten into a real friendship, and their dialogue is a treat to read.

If you like police procedurals, I can’t recommend Jane Casey’s Maeve Kerrigan series enough. It’s a great one. I envy anyone just picking up book one when there are four more to read right away!

The Galesburg Public Library owns all five books in the series. The first, The Burning, can be found in the adult Fiction section under the author's last name, Casey. They are also available as ebooks through the Alliance Digital Media Library (http://alliance.lib.overdrive.com/).

Murder in Thrall by Anne Cleeland

Murder in Thrall is not your normal British police procedural. The Detective Chief Inspector, Michael Acton, is a stalker. He admits as much to the object of his obsession, Detective Constable Kathleen Doyle, who is elevated from the lower ranks to work with him because of his interest in her. “Misdemeanor or felony?” she asks him. He thinks about it for a moment and replies “felony.” He has entered her apartment. He watches her through binoculars. He takes photos of her sleeping unaware and keeps them on his phone.

I was totally sucked into this odd mystery and didn’t want to stop reading. Each chapter opens with a brief insight into what’s going on in Acton’s mind. The rest of the narrative is from Doyle’s viewpoint. She has the ability to tell when most people are lying, which makes her very useful during interrogations. She has trouble reading Acton, but when he suggests before they have even had a date that they should solve their individual problems of finding suitable companions by marrying each other, she is shocked - but can tell that he truly means it.

I wondered early on if this was actually a psychological thriller, but as there are already two more books in the series, you can draw your own conclusions. I enjoyed the mystery part of this mystery, and it took some twists I did not expect. Some of the minor characters are fairly well developed. I read a lot of books by British authors and was impressed to come across a number of words and phrases that I did not know (although most of them, like “culchie,”  were from the Irish Doyle). The reference “brides-in-the-bath,” for example, is to an English serial killer case I’d never heard of that is an early example of the use of forensics in solving a crime.

On top of everything else, Acton has a title, so there were references to the British aristocracy on top of the usual SOCOs, DCIs, Evidence Recovery Units, and other terms I expect to find littered throughout police procedurals. Acton and Doyle’s relationship is further complicated beyond the fact that he is her boss because he is an erudite Anglican English Lord and she is an Irish Catholic nobody. Doyle is uneducated and inexperienced but intelligent and sensible. I enjoyed their banter and her way of handling tense situations.

Doyle’s manner of thinking and speaking is charming. She often refers to herself as her “fair self,” her “foolish self,”, her “motherless self,” etc., which I would have thought would have become annoying but did not. She has a healthy self-esteem and feels confident about her ability to deal with Acton’s obsession. She is trying to improve herself and often works in vocabulary words, another habit that could have become annoying but did not. Acton is a highly unprincipled DCI. There is a lot of material for future books in the series. I often smiled at Cleeland’s way with words, including sentences like “Men; honestly.” (p. 90 of the digital edition)

There was a plot point that took place early on but was revealed much later that felt like a cheap trick on the author’s part, and late in the book Doyle insists that Acton have sex with her after something had happened in an exchange that did not feel at all believable to me. But my complaints about the book are small and nit-picky.

The relationship between Acton and Doyle is clearly unhealthy, and I feel a bit conflicted about this book, but I was intrigued all the way through and will definitely read the next book in the series. If you like British police procedurals that feature a romance or morally ambiguous detectives, I recommend Murder in Thrall.

The Galesburg Public Library has the three books in Cleeland’s New Scotland Yard mystery series in both print and digital through eRead Illinois.

Under a Silent Moon by Elizabeth Haynes

Under a Silent Moon is the first in a new series. I love a good British police procedural, and this is a good one. The main character is Louisa Smith, a new Detective Chief Inspector. She had a brief relationship with one of her now subordinates, before she knew he was married. She’s attracted to the geeky Canadian analyst but leery after the disastrous affair.

The author is a police intelligence analyst, and it shows. The investigation and language feels authentic. Lou is an interesting character, and a number of supporting characters were well drawn with room to grow.

The mystery was okay, I find the whole BDSM angle a little overdone these days but it was fine. I enjoyed reading this book and look forward to a sequel. If you like books by Jane Casey, Jill McGown, Susan Hill, and other police procedurals, you will probably enjoy Under a Silent Moon. It can be found in the adult Fiction area under the author's last name.

The Betrayal of Trust by Susan Hill

The Betrayal of Trust arrived at the library with some other Advanced Reader Copies. Since I enjoy British police procedurals, I pulled it out to read even though I have not read any other books in the Simon Serrailler series by Susan Hill.

If I had read previous books in the series, I might have like the book more. As it was, characters and situations were introduced that I did not know anything about despite the assumption that I did.

The main character, Chief Superintendent Simon Serrailler, is not especially compelling, but the story jumps around a lot and is told from the point of view of other characters, so that was not a huge drawback. The author seemed to be making a political statement about the movement to legalize assisted suicide, but at the end I'm not clear on what the statement was. There was a complicated love-at-first-sight romance subplot that I absolutely hated and that added nothing to the story - I sped through those chapters to get back to the mystery.

On the whole, however, I enjoyed the book as a diverting read. I liked it enough that I will check out the first book in the series and give it a shot.