Death Toll

April 25, 2011
The chilly atmosphere of a British seacoast winter saturates Kelly's moody third police procedural featuring hard-driving West Norfolk Det. Insp. Peter Shaw and seedy, aging Det. Sgt. George Valentine, Shaw's late father's partner (after 2010's Death Watch). Appropriately, the novel focuses on two cold cases. Relocating a graveyard unearths the remains of a mixed-race young man who disappeared 28 years earlier, found atop the coffin of a murdered woman. Meanwhile, the detectives are trying to snare the sleek, ruthless murderer whose escape from justice, years before, thoroughly blighted the careers of Valentine and Shaw's father. The police must gropeâsometimes literallyâthrough a fog, in a tightly knit community where people don't know their neighbors as well as they imagine. And new murders prove that the past refuses to stay buried. Strong characterization more than compensates for some murky action.

June 15, 2011

DI Peter Shaw (Death Watch, 2010, etc.) deals with two cold cases, one of which is family business.

Not far from his Norfolk home, 9-year-old Jonathan Tessier is discovered dead, a homicide victim. Two excellent detectives catch the case, and in due time seemingly crack it. They arrest Robert Mosse, a 21-year-old law student, who's tried but eventually freed—a monumental speed bump for two fast-track careers tainted by the possibility of fabricated evidence. The officers, DCI Jack Shaw and his partner DI George Mortimer, of the West Norfolk Constabulary, suffer deeply in the aftermath of what turns out to be the Tessier debacle. Shaw, humiliated and embittered, resigns from the force. Mortimer, reduced in rank, spends a painful period wandering the North Norfolk boondocks. Thirteen years later, in one of those tricky games Fate likes to play, Mortimer finds himself partnered with a younger Shaw, Jack's son Peter, whose zeal to remove the Tessier taint matches his own. But there's a second cold case on their plates, this one even older and, in a variety of curious ways, more pressing. Twenty-eight years ago, Nora Tilden was murdered and her husband duly convicted and imprisoned. Trickster Fate, though, has suddenly arranged to disinter her coffin, atop which rest bones of another color, a mysterious set belonging to a black man who until now no one had considered missing.

Kelly writes impeccable prose and creates compelling characters, but the ungainly size of this novel will leave some readers feeling that the party just goes on too long.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 1, 2011
Seaside Norfolk, rainy and windswept, provides the perfect atmosphere for Kellys latest police procedural. An extremely cold case starts to warm up when a flood-prevention program uncovers several graves, one of them containing the twisted body of a male on top of the casket. Inside the casket is a woman known to have been murdered by her husband in 1982. The kicker is that the bones of her body have been broken since burial. Detective Inspector Shaw and Detective Sergeant Valentine of the West Norfolk Constabulary catch the case. Their questioning of suspects old and new, along with detailed forensic work, results in the exhumation of old vices and hatreds. Kelly makes his characters as intriguing as the case itself. The way he maintains a brooding tone that perfectly fits the crime and the setting without letting that tone take on a one-note monotony is truly remarkable. For lovers of keenly intelligent, nonformulaic procedurals.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)