Double Fault

January 20, 2014
Complicated interpersonal politics on both an emotional and professional level take center stage in Cutler’s solid fifth mystery featuring Det. Chief Supt. Fran Harman (after 2012’s Burying the Past). Fran’s fiancé, Mark—recently retired from the Ashford, Kent, force—faces the challenges of being an involved lay person with a policeman’s skills, when Livvie, the child of an instructor at his tennis club, is abducted while he and fellow “Golden Oldies” enjoy their weekly match. Fran, who temporarily leads an understaffed department, must balance the urgency of finding Livvie alive with the potential public relations disaster of waiting to notify the parents of now-skeletal teen victims found bricked into a wall at a defunct youth club until the victims’ bodies are identified. That a colleague on sudden leave is the prime suspect in the teen murders raises the stakes. Insightful, sophisticated characterizations of the crime solvers more than compensate for investigative work whose jumpy and implausible progress leads to unsatisfying results.