28 November 2013.
ISBN: 978-0-72788339-1 (HB)
The fifth in the series featuring Chief Superintendent Fran Harman, finds her fiancé ex ACC Mark Turner adjusting to retirement, and enjoying it. Having recently joined the local tennis club, what he muses, could be better on a spring morning than nipping down to the tennis club for a game with some of the regulars, or the Golden Oldies, as he has dubbed them.
Meanwhile life is not so agreeable for Fran - who
apart from suffering from a leg injury - has been asked to mentor a DCI who is
on secondment from the Met. And Sean Murray is not proving easy to deal with.
But all that is banished from her mind when she is called to a building site in
Ashford where demolition workers have found several human skeletons.
However, the disappearance of a young girl from the
tennis club where Mark was playing, takes precedence. Running two such high-profile cases is
difficult enough for Fran, but recent budget-cuts make her job even harder.
Added to that she is reporting to Chief Constable Wren with whom she has to
tread carefully.
Juggling both investigations but trying to give maximum publicity to the missing girl, while keeping the horrifying discovery of so many skeletons out of the media, Fran continues to tirelessly work both cases. That the Ashford case signifies a serial killer involves much delving into past records, and eventually two suspects emerge.
The personalities of the two main protagonists and
Fran’s team provide interesting reading. The difficulty of working with a team
and remaining in charge is dealt with, with insight, understanding and
compassion whilst keeping discipline – not an easy matter, but Fran manages it.
However, facing retirement and dealing with the onset of the physical
restrictions that old age brings is a different matter altogether, and one we
all face, and which the author deals with in a realistic but sympathetic
manner. Highly recommended.
------
Reviewer: Lizzie Hayes
Judith
Cutler was born
in the Black Country, just outside Birmingham, later moving to the Birmingham
suburb of Harborne. Judith started writing while she was at the then Oldbury
Grammar School, winning the Critical Quarterly Short Story prize with the second
story she wrote. She subsequently read English at university. It was an attack
of chickenpox caught from her son that kick-started her writing career. One way
of dealing with the itch was to hold a pencil in one hand, a block of paper in
the other - and so she wrote her first novel. This eventually appeared in a much-revised
version as Coming Alive, published by Severn House. Judith has seven
series. The first two featured amateur sleuth Sophie Rivers (10 books) and
Detective Sergeant Kate Power (6 Books). Then came Josie Wells, a middle-aged
woman with a quick tongue, and a love of good food, there are two books, The Food Detective and The Chinese Takeout. The Lina Townsend
books are set in the world of antiques and there are seven books in this series.
There are three books featuring Tobias Campion set in the Regency period, and
her series featuring Chief Superintendent Fran Harman (6 books), and Jodie
Welsh, Rector’s wife and amateur sleuth. Her more recently a series feature a
head teacher Jane Cowan (3 books). Judith has also written three standalone’s Staging
Death, Scar Tissue, and Death In Elysium. Her new series is set in
Victorian times featuring Matthew Rowsley. Death’s Long Shadow is the third
book in this series. 
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