DARK BLUE AND DANGEROUS

When the body of up-and-coming cop Sergeant Chris Proctor is pulled from the frozen canal on his beat, murder is quickly verified by Inspector George Rogers and his extra-marital girlfriend Dr. Bridget Hunter, the police pathologist. And when the Inspector starts probing into Proctor's life, he turns up a string of affairs, mostly with married women--and one very irate husband, Major Darrow-Blake, whose private eye had Proctor more or less under surveillance at the time of his death. In fact, the desolate scene of the crime seems to have been teeming with people at the fateful hour--including Darrow-Blake's aristocratic wife and a derelict old woman whose strangled corpse is found during a police search of the area. And finally, when Darrow-Blake's private eye is found dead in a pseudosuicide, Inspector Rogers marshals his facts and forces for a tedious reconstruction. Competent police-procedural legwork--but, as in previous Ross/Rogers sleuthing, there are lots of bodies but little conviction or spirit.