THE RETURN

For 20 years and longer, Margaret South has successfully repressed the memory of watching her University of York law school friends, easily led by Paul Stapylton and natural bully Bernard Ffyrst, murder inoffensively social-climbing Norris Smith and bury his body in a wood belonging to Bernard’s father. Now that suddenly recovered memory has sprung once more to hideous life. And Margaret’s timing couldn’t be worse: the body is about to be unearthed by rolling-stone misfit Michael Jolly and the providential metal detector he’s purchased with the proceeds of a recent theft. Confronted with the palpable sign of her conspiratorial concealment all these years, Margaret begins to crumble. She’s already left off her charity work and resigned her post as a lay magistrate; now she worries about what will happen to her physician husband and her family when she’s hauled away to prison. In this supreme moment of crisis, she unwisely decides to get in touch with Stapylton and Ffyrst, and they, being made of sterner stuff, soon add her name to Norris Smith’s on the docket of cases for Chief Inspector George Hennessey and Sgt. Yellich of the Micklegate Bar Police. The ensuing complications are notable only for Turnbull’s restraint in developing any of his characters or scattering dust in the faces of his sharp-eyed coppers; soon enough they’re questioning the very men they seek and concentrating not on whodunit but on how to catch them out.

A snappy formula procedural on which Turnbull (The Man with No Face, 1998, etc.) lavishes nary an extra detail, emotion, or word.