A Walk with the Dead

February 11, 2013
Two cases drive Spencer’s solid sixth 1970s Lancashire mystery featuring Det. Chief Insp. Monika Paniatowski (after 2012’s Lambs to the Slaughter). When 13-year-old Jill Harris disappears after a family wedding in Whitebridge that Monika attended, the girl’s mother phones Monika to ask for her help. The next day, furtive young lovers discover Jill’s corpse hidden in the bushes of a town park, and Monika and her team go into action. Meanwhile, the Home Office assigns Chief Constable George Baxter to review a suicide, but he soon has difficulties with the defensive staff of the Yorkshire prison where an inmate hanged himself in his cell the month before. The courses of both investigations nicely mix deduction and procedure as they verge on the predictable but surprising link between the two. Series fans will appreciate such melodramatic personal moments as the time the chief constable’s wife becomes jealous after George returns to Whitebridge to see Monika instead of her.

Narrator Penelope Freeman does a stellar job with this sixth Deputy Chief Inspector Monika Paniatowski mystery. The confident detective is also a nurturing mother who is helping her 13-year-old daughter recover from being kidnapped. When two girls are murdered, Paniatowski takes it personally as she embarks on the painful case. Freeman also excels at distinctly portraying the numerous cops in the story, deftly reflecting their personalities and backgrounds. The most interesting is George Baxter, Paniatowski's driven boss and former lover, who is on a difficult assignment involving the suicide of an imprisoned pedophile. Fascinating interviews with long-term prisoners take listeners into a believable setting. The two investigations--perhaps a bit unbelievably--converge in a complicated conclusion. S.G.B. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine