A Dreadful Past

January 4, 2016
British author Turnbull’s engrossing fifth police procedural featuring Det. Chief Insp. Harry Vicary (after 2014’s Denial of Murder) opens quietly enough when Andrew “Big Andy” Cragg, a minor gang member—really a gofer or errand boy—drops into a London pub. Over a pint, Cragg drunkenly confides to a stranger that he once helped dispose of a murder victim in a neighborhood south of the Thames. The stranger turns out to be an undercover Scotland Yard detective, who seizes Cragg’s beer glass as evidence as soon as he walks out of the pub. A young woman’s body is indeed found in the spot Cragg designated, sending Vicary and his team to their missing person files. One thing slowly leads to another, and eventually the squad painstakingly analyzes 10-year-old clues. Turnbull unobtrusively slips details of the officers’ private lives into the action. A lot of people do a daunting amount of work on the way to the satisfying conclusion.

October 1, 2016
British coppers Hennessey and Yellich return in another challenging case, this one dealing with a long-ago murder, a broken vase, a gang of brutal killers, and a psychological transformation. When Noel Middleton spots a Wedgwood vase in the window of a local antiques shop, he is sure the vase is one that belonged to his family, who were brutally murdered 20 years earlier in what appeared to be a robbery gone horribly wrong. The vase was one of the items taken by the killers, so how did it end up in an antiques shop? Once he's confirmed via the initials on the bottom of the vase that it is his family's, Middleton goes straight to the police to ask them to reopen the case. Cold cases are not the norm for Hennessey and Yellich, but they take this one on, despite knowing it may be impossible to solve after all this time. But as they ferret out clues, follow up on tenuous leads, and explore means, motives, and opportunities, they find themselves gripped by one of the most violent, terrifying, chilling cases of their careers. As usual, Turnbull writes in his idiosyncratic, rather old-fashioned style, but it is this unique stylealong with the inventive plots, complex characters, and thorough descriptions of police workthat makes his books appealing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)