DEATH ON THE ELEVENTH HOLE

When Detective Sergeant Bert Hook slices into the rough on the 11th fairway at Ross-on-Wye, it’s bad for more than just his score. The corpse of a young woman half-floating in a drainage ditch signals the start of a sad new case for Hook and his longtime partner, Supt. John Lambert (An Unsuitable Death, 2000, etc.). Kate Wharton may have been a prostitute, a drug user, even a pusher, but at barely 20, she had seen more than her share of hard times and hard people—including her mother Julie, who comes to the morgue to identify her body without batting an eye or shedding a tear; Joe Ashton, the boyfriend who moves between the haven of Father Gillespie’s shelter and the hell of heroin in the Gloucester slums; and Malcolm Flynn, Kate’s connection to the dealers who simply don’t allow their subcontractors to quit on them. Even the men at the fringes of Kate’s brief life—Richard Ellacott, a sometime client, and Roy Cook, her mother’s sometime lover—have a hand in Kate’s misery and now try desperately to cover their tracks. But it’s up to Lambert, on the eve of his retirement, to distinguish who’s merely injured Kate from who’s killed her in order to bring his last case to a satisfying close.

Lambert and Hook deliver the goods in this straightforward, conventional, yet touching farewell performance. Well above par.