A PACT OF SILENCE

DC Jane Salt is just trying to get a little distance from her boss and lover, DI Frank Kavanagh, but crime has a way of throwing them back together.

Way back in the Summer of Love, Gareth Thomas and Terry Morgan, a pair of Shropshire lads working on a construction site, played a prank that left their foreman, Joe Tate, dead. Panicking, they hastily buried Joe’s corpse, hid his uneaten lunch in a most unlikely spot and went on with their lives. Gary set himself to making some serious money as a property owner; Terry parlayed his talents playing football (soccer) into a lucrative career that dried up suddenly and sadly. And that would be the end of the story if something hadn’t made longtime restaurant reviewer Julian Betts decide to retire to the market village of Oswestry just as a falling-out with Kavanagh (Written Out, 2009, etc.) sends Salt off to stay with Carrie Prowse, a friend in that same Shropshire village. There follow a veiled telephone threat, a half-hearted kidnapping attempt, a more determined attempted rape and a pair of contemporary murders. Kavanagh, arriving at a timely moment, declares a truce with Salt and takes the reins from local DI Michael Scrivens in a thoroughly routine attempt to figure out what the gentle reader already knows.

Lots of incident but little momentum. Nor is Armstrong especially successful it making it interesting to watch those 40-year-old chickens come home to roost.