A DANGEROUS FRIENDSHIP

A security officer falls under suspicion when information about targets ripe for robbery is leaked from his CID office.

Five days after DC Andy Gregg provides a detailed review of the porous anti-theft protection at Querry Brade, the Irwins’ Elizabethan home, the house is broken into by thieves who evidently knew exactly which picture in the bedroom concealed the wall safe and were determined to empty it before the Irwins installed more security. Gregg stoutly swears that neither of the superiors with access to his report, DI Horton or DS Warren, would have been capable of selling information about Querry Brade’s vulnerability to a gang of professional thieves. So according to the ineluctable logic of Detective Chief Superintendent McGill, the inside man must be Gregg himself, eager to provide the niceties for his pregnant wife Wendy. The stakes go up when a second robbery, also greased by confidential information about a supermarket’s security system, leads to the murder of a constable who interrupts it. Despite the Kent County CID’s refusal to look for another suspect, even Wendy knows who the real culprit is: her husband’s best friend, DC Sidney Lodge, who’s so besotted with his expensive wife Guinevere that he’ll do anything for her. Will Gregg and Wendy be able to turn the investigation against Lodge before it’s too late? And why on earth aren’t Gregg’s other colleagues looking more closely at him?

Serviceable low-level work from an old pro (Illegal Guilt, 2007, etc.). Shorn of the nagging moral quiddities that are Ashford’s stock in trade, there’s not much meat on these bones.