Remain Silent

April 6, 2020
At the start of Steiner’s sluggish third novel featuring Det. Insp. Manon Bradshaw (after 2018’s Persons Unknown), Bradshaw, an officer on the Cambridgeshire, England, police force, discovers the body of a young man hanging from a tree in the park. Pinned to the victim’s trousers is a note in Lithuanian that translates as “The dead cannot speak”; a card that may be a driver’s license identifies him as Lukas Balsys, a Lithuanian immigrant. Bradshaw and her partner, Det. Sgt. Davy Walker, investigate what they suspect is a murder made to look like a suicide. Flashbacks show Lukas and other Lithuanians lured by promises of work to England, where a fellow Lithuanian, Eidikus, soon has them catching chickens in a filthy warehouse and living in toxic houses with bedbug-ridden mattresses on the floor. Two other men are hanged, and another dies in the warehouse. Some humor and the loving exchanges between Bradshaw and her husband provide relief from the grim crimes, but the plot meanders slowly. Steiner has done better. Agent: Eleanor Jackson, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.