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DEATH IN DARK WATERS
by Patricia Hall
St Martin's Minotaur, February 2004
273 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 0312321554


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

The Club Carib is emptying for the night. Youngsters, both black and white, in all stages of intoxication, mill about outside the club preparing to go home. A taxi, driven by a Pakistani, accidentally hits Jeremy Adams, who is wandering about under the influence of Ecstasy.

The DJ and his friend come out of the club and send all the kids home, before trouble ensues from the gang of Asian kids from the mosque down the street who hang out across from the club. DCI Michael Thackeray is in charge of the case.

That same night, Stevie Maddison, is trying to find his friend, Derek. Derek has been clean and has been helping Stevie to stay off drugs. Stevie searches for Derek and finally sees him being taken to the roof of one of the buildings on the estate. Hiding under a stairwell, Stevie sees Derek thrown off the roof to his death.

Joyce Ackroyd, Laura's left-wing elderly grandmother is helping out at The Project, a scheme to try to keep some of the teens from the Wuthering Heights estate out of trouble by teaching them computer skills and giving them a safe place to come to. It is run by Donna Maitland whose nephew was killed by drugs, and a lottery grant and some donations enabled her to set up this scheme. Laura gets a phone call to come and pick up her grandmother. When she gets there, she finds the equipment has been vandalized and the computers destroyed. Joyce is angry and insists that she will go to the Town Hall the next day and set things right.

Of course, Joyce is barely remembered at the Town Hall. But she forges ahead, and Laura does some investigating, while her lover Michael Thackeray also starts investigating The Heights for a possible connection with the case of the Adams boy. The Ecstasy did not come from the club, which becomes the site of an arson fire. Adams' father is a developer, and the Heights is a sink estate built on very valuable land, so another element is added when Joyce's cottage is also vandalized.

This a very well-written densely plotted book. And Hall does not forget character development. Patricia Hall is a former journalist, and like the best of that breed, gives us the information we need with a minimum of fuss. Yorkshire contains some of the most beautiful places in England. Bradfield isn't one of them, and it is the kind of place most people will visit only in books.

Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, January 2004

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