NO BIRDS SING

When a crime wave hits Castlemere, Superintendent Frank Shapiro's Queen's Street cops rush headlong to put themselves in the line of fire. Inspector Liz Graham, noting that two recent rape victims both resemble her, wants to have herself staked as bait for their attacker. And loose-cannon Sergeant Cal Donovan, fresh from thwarting a daring train robbery, goes undercover with a pit bull to get a line on whoever dumped a rotting canine corpse on Shapiro's front porch—only to find that he's hit the jackpot via an invitation to join the ram-raiders who've been crashing their 4x4 into shopfronts and scurrying off with whatever they can carry. In an ordinary genre writer's hands, both the undercover ops would generate some nail-biting tension before their predictable success; but both of the Castlemere coppers get badly burned when their masquerades are so successful that they backfire, leaving Graham and Donovan violated and traumatized. Bannister's especially persuasive in dramatizing Graham's combination of outrage, sympathy, and obsessive determination to get the man who's now added her to his list. A notch below A Taste for Burning (1995)—which places it just below the highest ranks of the British procedural.