COLD WRATH

A career criminal is shot dead at his Yorkshire estate.

Make no mistake: Miles Law knew practically from the moment he first met his employer, Anthony Garrett, that Garrett was a criminal. It takes one to know one, Law explains to DCI George Hennessey (A Dreadful Past, 2016, etc.), admitting that his younger days were marked by petty theft and low-level cons. Garrett strikes Law as a more sophisticated operator, so in a strange way, the gardener is shocked to discover his employer in his armchair with a bullet hole in his forehead, but not exactly surprised. Hennessey and his team aren’t really surprised either once they read Garrett’s history with (and against) the law, although their curiosity is piqued when the Metropolitan Police send a detective constable all the way up from London to photograph a tattoo on the dead man’s arm. But there’s no evidence that Garrett, an East Ender by birth, ever returned to London after his release from Full Sutton, a prison outside York. Instead he retired to The Grange, an isolated country house typically entered by no one except a squad of cleaners from The Maids—not even Law, until, spooked by an open ground-floor window, he goes inside and finds Garrett’s body. So the report from neighbor Linda Holyman of a visit by three identically dressed women the weekend before Law’s grisly discovery tips Hennessey’s investigation on its ear. The uncanniness of the women’s visit in the face of Garrett’s austere, predictable household habits presents a puzzle as offbeat as it is inexplicable.

Turnbull offers a conventional procedural with a twist that should leave readers eager for more.