An enjoyable UK police procedural that leans hard on genre requirements. Detective Inspector Thomas Ridpath returns to work as a Coroner’s investigator after the murder of his wife on their doorstep in Manchester. He is ordered to review, confidentially, the ongoing investigation into the murder of a young boy. The investigation is being run by a Detective Chief Inspector thar DI Ridpath has a strained relationship with. Ridpath, with two colleagues, conducts a parallel investigation and the process leads to significant conflict with his superior officers. The story unfolds well, the reveals are well set up and the conclusion is happily unexpected.
The story is slightly dull, none of the cast fully spark to life and engage the reader. It is efficiently written, the cast are given the room they need to come off the page, they just fail to launch. This makes the book a little hard to continue reading,
The plot and the cast are all competently delivered, M.J. Lee works extremely hard to lift them up, I did not catch it.
