LONG TIME DEAD

The discovery of one corpse too many in a couple’s Liverpool gravesite reopens a seven-year-old case with explosive complications.

Police Constable Kate Armitage and newspaper editor Ellie Sands were shot before the eyes of shop assistant Sally Doneghy back in 1997. Ellie survived, Kate didn’t, and the likely shooter, drug dealer John Lively, vanished. The case has languished since then, mainly because Ellie’s brain damage has prevented her from constructing coherent sentences, let alone identifying the man who shot her. Then, in 2004, Lively surfaces in a literal fashion, his body unearthed by a gravedigger preparing for the late Brian Walters to join his wife. Gathering her investigative team, DI Sheridan Holler—who joined the force in the so-far-unfulfilled hope of identifying the person who ended the life of her beloved brother, Matthew, when he was only 12—is astonished when DS Anna Markinson drops the bombshell that Lively and Kate Armitage were shot by the same weapon. As nursing home caregiver Joni Summers labors to interpret Ellie’s incoherent utterances, Sheridan obsessively asks who could possibly have had reason to kill both these victims seven years apart. The answer will require a complex and unconscionably extended series of flashbacks and postludes that may leave readers wondering what all those remaining pages are for. But Sheridan and her team are never less than compelling, and the significance of the clever leading clue will elude most readers even though Payne flourishes it at every opportunity.

Worth every interminable minute it takes to wind down.