RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT

DCI Harry Brock (Make Them Pay, 2013, etc.) investigates the murder of an accountant and the disappearance of his wife.

Brock wants to make one thing clear: When the folks at Homicide and Serious Crime Command West want him, they’re more likely to find him in the bed of his shapely blonde paramour, chorus dancer Gail Sutton, than in his own. So when Gavin Creasey calls Brock from the incident room at the Met, he’s taken aback to find Harry in his own flat. Despite his unusual starting point, Brock finds his way to West Drayton, where Clifford Gregory lies in his bed with a massive head wound and Gregory’s wife, Sharon, sits shaken and bruised in the spare room. She claims she went downstairs, naked, to confront an intruder, who immediately tied her up and killed her pixilated husband. Brock and his team, DI Kate Ebdon and DS Dave Poole, are skeptical, and forensic evidence increases their doubt. None of the scotch drenching Gregory’s body is found in his stomach, and it turns out he was suffocated, not bludgeoned to death. Further probing reveals that flight attendant Sharon Gregory, bored with her husband’s absorption in reconciling people’s books and building model planes, has acquired a string of lovers stretching from Heathrow to Miami. So when Sharon goes missing, it’s a fairly straightforward matter of interviewing one of her men after another, and pretty soon, Harry’s back under the duvet snuggling with the comely Ms. Sutton.

Brock’s not half as smooth as he thinks he is and not nearly witty enough to get this case airborne.