Four Below

November 21, 2011
The English city of Bristol, during a bitter cold winter, provides the backdrop for Helton’s atmospheric second crime novel featuring Det. Insp. Liam McCluskey (after 2011’s Falling More Slowly). Helton focuses on McCluskey’s continuing difficulty in adjusting to his new posting, after having been in Southampton, but also spares time for the perspectives of his colleagues, notably fellow Det. Insp. Kat Fairfield, and a variety of witnesses and victims in a wave of violence apparently connected to drug kingpin Ray Fenton’s recent jailing. In true procedural style, the brooding, disheveled detective’s attempt to discover the common cause behind such disparate events as a criminal’s fatal car crash, the discovery of severed body parts, and the sale of poisoned heroin reveals much about police work’s unglamorous reality. Helton’s strong feeling for character, place, and mordant humor should compensate most readers for a plot that never quite gathers momentum.

January 1, 2012
A dodgy batch of heroin leads to many murders. That longtime drug users will die relatively young is to be expected. That their last hit will be laced with anthrax is not. And it gets worse. A sadist is littering Leigh Woods and bicycle paths with severed body parts and thoroughly mashed faces. Bristol CID is overwhelmed not only by the escalating body count but by arctic weather and a cantankerous heating system that leaves the precinct frigid. Assisted by DS Austin, DI Liam McLusky, still fairly new to the area (Falling More Slowly, 2011, etc.), is saddled with sorting through matters, which become yet more complicated when DI Kat Fairfield beds a woman he's seeing and Denkhaus, his superior, reams him out for irritating a local nabob. Meanwhile, someone is sending the newspaper snippets of pictures that may well reveal what started the murder spree. Unbeknownst to McLusky, similar snippets are being used to blackmail the brains behind the killings. Adding to the treachery, of course, is all that snow and ice and an interrupted burglary that lands McLusky on crutches. Helton, who seems to have learned how to hatch plots and evoke threats from studying the adroit Bill James, delivers a gritty procedural with an idiosyncratic hero well worth rooting for.

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