Thanks to Compulsive Readers for inviting me onto the #TeamTennison project and to Zaffre Books for my copy of this – the fourth in the series covering Jane Tennison’s life before Prime Suspect.
As always, opinions are my own.
In this book, Jane Tennison has been made Detective Sergeant and is working in Peckham CID, in a tough part of London and in a policing team imbued with the all-too-familiar misogyny and racism that we’ve seen before in the series. When a young woman is found killed in Bussey Alley, Peckham, Jane Tennison is first on the scene and keen to find the killer. A second body with no obvious link to the first other than physical proximity throws Tennison’s team into confusion…and a third murder on their patch tests them further. The newspapers begin stirring up panic about a serial killer in Peckham – as Tennison uncovers some baffling links and leads…
As with the previous books in the series, the historical settings feels authentic and credible. Here, it’s 1979 and the bitterly cold ‘Winter of Discontent’ where strikes were having a huge impact on the country. It’s a bleak setting for a story of murder in one of London’s toughest areas – and it works well.
What I enjoyed about this book was that Tennison – as she rises through the ranks of the police – gets more experience of the forensic and technical sides of policing. It’s stomach-churning at times, but it’s interesting to be in the autopsy lab or finding out more about fingerprinting or ESDA techniques to uncover indented writing. Obviously this is 1970s technology, but it all makes the police procedural plotline more absorbing.
It’s also interesting to watch Jane Tennison develop as a character; in this instalment, she has more faith in her own abilities and is more prepared to stand her ground. She isn’t immune to making procedural errors (as in the previous books) but her instincts are proving more sound as she grows in confidence.
By having Tennison keep moving within the London police, there are a lot of characters to deal with throughout the series – some recurring, some not. I’ll admit that this is the area that I struggle with the most as I’m terrible at knowing who is who, but La Plante does give some handy back-story and description in places.
This is probably my favourite of the series so far – it’s a really clever police procedural with the tension well-managed as the clues fall into place and the net tightens on the culprit. I’d recommend this book (and the whole series) to all crime fiction fans.
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