KINGDOM OF SILENCE

Something is killing the best animals in England.

It’s 2001 when the first unobtrusive but unmistakable signs of Foot-and-Mouth Disease are spotted. Anxiously, MAFF (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food) takes corrective steps. In the blink of an eye, however, these measures accelerate into wholesale culling, the slaughter of cattle, sheep, pigs and goats in a tragically counterproductive attempt to gain control of a disease teeming with ugly ramifications. Meanwhile, certain activist groups have been using the turmoil to further their radical agendas. One headline-seeking clan coldly guns down an FBI Special Agent traveling in England on special assignment. An unintended consequence of the brutal murder is its galvanizing effect on DS Keen Dunliffe (Kingdom of Lies, 2005), who, bored and depressed, has been marking time in a dead-end post under a know-nothing boss. Suddenly, Keen is in play again, dispatched to North Yorkshire as a key figure in an undercover operation aimed at bringing down the terrorists’ brutish leader. It’s an operation fraught with danger and unforeseen complications, and when the smoke clears Keen finds himself irrevocably changed—as a cop, certainly, but in more fundamental ways as well.

Wood, who made her bones in science fiction, has now produced two exemplary police procedurals that are authentic and appealingly character-driven.