SUNDAY SILENCE

French polishes off the week of titles (Dark Saturday, 2017, etc.), though evidently not the series, in which London psychotherapist Frieda Klein tangles with a series of killers who all have ties of one sort or another to the same evil genius.

Great news for Frieda: after ages of doubting her increasingly desperate allegations that preternaturally slippery Dean Reeve, reported a suicide seven years ago, is still alive, DCI Malcolm Karlsson is finally ready to reconsider. The reason why is not such great news: Frieda’s Ukrainian builder friend, Josef Morozov, has found the rotting corpse of ex-copper Bruce Stringer, who’d been helping her hunt for Reeve, under the floorboards of her own house. And Stringer’s murder seems to be only the first of a rapid-fire series of new outrages directed specifically against people close to Frieda. In short order, Daniel Glasher, an electrician who passed information about Reeve on to Stringer, is found dead shortly after sending Frieda a threatening note; her niece, Chloë Klein, is kidnapped, drugged, and photographed in a humiliatingly compromising position; Reuben McGill, the analyst who trained her, is savagely attacked in his own home; and Josef’s son Alexei, newly arrived from Ukraine, is snatched from a crowded market in broad daylight. Frieda, now reduced to hiring a private detective to check on the bona fides of her friends’ recent acquaintances and her own newest patients, wonders where it will end—and whether this latest wave of violence is the work of Dean Reeve or of a monstrously resourceful copycat.

The biggest surprise here is not whodunit but just when French will reveal the truth. But fans caught up in the relentless intensity of the sorely tried heroine’s latest travails will be too busy worrying about other, more dangerous problems to notice.