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Wednesday 28 September 2022

‘Double Fault’ by Judith Cutler

Published by Severn House,
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.
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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.   

http://www.judithcutler.com

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