A Velvet Scream

January 23, 2012
In Masters’s solid 10th Joanna Piercy mystery (after 2009’s Grave Stones), the Staffordshire detective inspector faces three challenges: a disciplinary hearing, her fast approaching wedding day, and the near death and possible rape of 14-year-old Kayleigh Harrison, who was found early one morning almost naked and drunk in the snow outside Patches nightclub. Frustrated by a lack of physical clues and Kayleigh’s impaired recall of events, Piercy and her crew are stymied, not even sure a crime has been committed. A similar case in a nearby town and the later disappearance of underage Molly Carraway from the same club put pressure on the force. In addition to delving into the family lives of the three girls, the police investigate Patches staff members and male patrons, with disturbing results. Masters doesn’t settle for easy answers as Piercy’s increasing anxiety about her forthcoming wedding provides a constant drumbeat to the desperate search for Molly.

March 1, 2012
A series of attacks that may or not be rape pose a difficult case for DI Joanna Piercy and her colleagues. Joanna is busy getting ready for a wedding she's not at all sure she wants when a young girl is found nearly frozen in the parking area of Patches, a local night club in Leek. The disapproving parents and daughter of Joanna's intended, Dr. Matthew Levin, are making life so difficult for her that the new case is a welcome distraction. The avowed victim, Kayleigh Harrison, is the 14-year-old daughter of a mother who couldn't care less and a father who went back to London when she was a baby. She claims that she was raped, but her description of a thin older attacker with a London accent doesn't ring true. Joanna and her team question the clubgoers and staff and watch the surveillance tape but make little progress. The case becomes much more urgent when the university-bound daughter of two local teachers vanishes from Patches and Joanna discovers to the parents' horror that their beautiful child has been sneaking off to clubs for quite a while. When her body is found, they connect it to another case in a different town where a girl was drugged, raped and nearly killed. Even once they know they're looking for a sexual predator with a taste for young girls, finding him will be no easy task. Masters, who writes several different series (Frozen Charlotte, 2011, etc.), here gives Joanna a sturdy police procedural with a touch of romance.

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February 15, 2012
Tarted-up underage girls secretly going clubbing are becoming targets in Staffordshire towns. As DI Joanna Piercy is investigating the suspected rape of 14-year-old Kayleigh Harrison, found nearly dead of hypothermia outside the nightclub Patches in Leek, she learns of the death months earlier of 15-year-old Danielle Brixton outside a club in a nearby town. Then 16-year-old Molly Carraway vanishes one night from Patches, leaving her parents distraught at her disappearance and angry at her deception. Certain that Kayleigh is not telling the whole truth, Piercy manipulates the dysfunctional Harrison family as she attempts to determine the relationship between the three cases. At the same time, she must deal with a disciplinary hearing that could end her career as well as with her approaching wedding to forensic pathologist Matthew Levin. Piercy's close working relationship with her partner, DS Mike Korpanski, adds interest to this tenth in Masters' series of solid British police procedurals with a strong but sensitive female protagonist.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)