DEAD MAN’S WHARF

Crank phone calls and a break-in at a nursing home are more sinister than they first seem to DI Andy Horton (The Suffocating Sea, 2008, etc.).

There’s nothing like a murder to make a trivial matter assume more weight. Take Mr. Kingsway’s complaint that someone assaulted his mother at the Rest Haven Nursing Home. Sounds like the ramblings of a senile old bat—except that Irene Ebury, the woman in the next bed, died that night, and her son Peter met his end shortly after in Kingston Prison. Diver Perry Jackson’s claim that someone made harassing phone calls to him and his crew while he stayed in the Queen’s Hotel filming episodes of Wrecks Around Britain could well be a publicity stunt—until his co-star, Nick Farnsworth, turns up dead in a diving suit at Oldham’s Wharf. Now even Daniel Collins’ drunk-driving smashup on Christmas Eve seems dicey; after all, Collins had worked at Rest Haven and spun out at Oldham’s. Horton can’t quite put all the pieces together yet. But since his nitpicking supervisor DCI Bliss gets mysteriously called away to participate in some nebulous training, and his new assistant, DC Harriet Lee, actually works for the Intelligence Directorate, Horton knows that when he does, it will all blow sky-high.

Rowson turns out an exemplary procedural with the requisite plot twists, double-crosses and all loose ends tied up neatly in a sailor’s knot.