The Raven's Eye

September 16, 2013
In Maitland’s intricate 12th procedural starring Det. Chief Insp. David Brock and Det. Insp. Kathy Kolla (after 2011’s Chelsea Mansions), a young woman’s apparently accidental death in London’s Paddington district proves more complicated than it initially appears. Kathy, resisting Commander Fred Lynch’s push to reduce department expenses, decides to more thoroughly investigate the fatal carbon monoxide poisoning of Vicky Hawke aboard a houseboat. She discovers that “Vicky” was actually named Gudrun Kite and that her sister, Freyja, died the year before in an unsolved hit-and-run. Lynch is more interested in capturing fugitive Jack “the Butcher” Bragg, and enlists Kathy, who resembles Bragg’s wife, to act as bait. Meanwhile, Brock discovers a link between himself and the poisoning case—both sisters attended his alma mater, Trinity College, Cambridge—and also finds out that Freyja was involved in computer security work. Maitland nicely ties together disparate elements to create a tale that is both a satisfying mystery and a telling comment on today’s surveillance society.

November 15, 2013
The financial pinch has come to the Metropolitan Police's Homicide and Serious Crime Squad, along with all manner of cutting-edge technology that's supposed to allow the police to do more with less. And it would be hard to say which of the two is the bigger problem. Cmdr. Fred Lynch is furious that DI Kathy Kolla and DS Mickey Schaeffer have been called to the death scene of Vicky Hawke, who must have gotten a fatal dose of carbon monoxide accidentally from the heater on her narrowboat. Nor is he mollified by DCI David Brock's feeling that if Kolla thinks the death looks suspicious, it probably is. Not even the news that Vicky Hawke isn't at all who she seems, or that her sister was killed in an even more suspicious hit-and-run accident last year, encourages him to give Kolla and Brock (Chelsea Mansions, 2011, etc.) the green light. Instead, Lynch seems determined to keep every member of Homicide and Serious Crime focused on Operation Intruder, devoted to the capture of Jack Bragg, a vicious gang leader who fled England to avoid prosecution but has now been drawn back home by his wife's infidelity. (His decision to stake out Kolla as a double for Patsy Bragg leads to the first time in the case, though hardly the last, that Kolla incurs grievous bodily harm.) So, naturally, Kolla and Brock proceed on their own, questioning the owners of neighboring boats docked in Regent's Canal, investigating the research of the dead sister, checking hundreds of digitized files and miles of video footage, and linking the murder of the woman calling herself Vicky Hawke to the return of Jack Bragg. The complications may be far-fetched, but Maitland's ability to root them deeply in the psychology of his characters and spring surprises that seem as inevitable as they are unexpected make for another deeply satisfying case.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 1, 2013
Scotland Yard's DCI David Brock and DI Kathy Kolla have a lot on their plates in this latest entry in the series. Brock has his hands full with a new boss, who's planning to implement a lot of unwanted departmental changes (including, naturally, cuts to the budget). Kolla's seemingly routine investigation into the accidental death of a local woman gets pretty complicated, pretty quickly, and soon Brock and Kolla are trying to solve the mystery of the victim's identity and determine whether her death was an isolated incident or part of a larger picture. As always, the strength of the book rests on the shoulders of its stars, Brock and Kolla, whose professional and personal relationship (Brock is Kolla's friend and colleague, but also her mentor) is, from time to time, more interesting than the cases they are working. This is not one of those times, though: here, the mystery is intriguing and cleverly constructed, and series fans should find themselves impatiently turning the pages, trying to figure out what's going on.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)