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In the third of a brilliant series, David Mark's gentle giant of a detective, a philosophical man who brings his heart as well as his head to work with him, follows in the footsteps of many fictional detecting into a psychologist's office. He's been ordered to seek counseling, which lets us peek a bit into his past even while he upholds the tradition of being skeptical. He has other things he'd rather be doing, and when his boss, Trish Pharaoh, phones him to say he's wanted at a murder, he's relieved – at least until he sees the body.
Someone has attacked a perfectly ordinary middle-aged woman with extreme brutality. Her chest has been caved in by blunt force. But it's not likely a random attack. Aector becomes convinced that she knew her killer, that when he stopped her on the street she recognized him. He needs to delve into the past to find what motivated such a vicious attack. And, before too long, to find out if it's connected to another brutal murder.
While Aector is busy with the case, his beloved Romany wife, Roisin, has a run-in with a small-time drug dealer and her own sense of justice kicks in. She calls the police, but before they get there, her instinct to physically resist being intimidated by a man has led her to take an action that puts her in a drug operation's cross hairs. Aector soon finds himself embroiled in more than one case, one of them rooted in crimes of the past and the other in current business practices as a new firm makes a hostile takeover of Hull's narcotics trafficking.
David Mark is an extraordinarily fine writer whose characters are so vivid and complex they jump off the page. In this entry, as in the first in the series (THE DARK WINTER) the plot is a bit of a contraption, with murders crafted perhaps more elaborately than is entirely likely, but it's all fitted together so beautifully that it's not hard to suspend disbelief. The author didn't really need to leave us with a cliffhanger. We'd be back for more regardless.
§ Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, July 2014
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