Mothers of the Disappeared

June 23, 2014
J. McNee has a lot on his plate in McLean’s absorbing fourth mystery featuring the Dundee, Scotland, PI (after 2012’s Father Confessor). The Association of British Investigators suspended him for a shooting that took place four years earlier, but Sandy Griggs, a Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency operative, is pressuring him to go undercover to pursue David Burns, a powerful and ruthless criminal. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Farnham asks McNee to reinvestigate the death of her 10-year-old son, Justin. Farnham is convinced that Alex Moorehead, the man who confessed to, and was later convicted of, the boy’s murder, is innocent. He was a suspect in other similar cases, but remained mum about them. McNee’s reopening of the Farnham case leads to new deaths, and he has to fend off Griggs while trying to bring down Burns. The disgraced cop turned PI is an old formula, but McLean proves it still works just fine.