DEAD RINGER

Cook’s latest procedural turns on a deep, dark environmental cover-up.

“FUNERAL OF MAN FOUND IN HARBOUR” reads the headline of the Penzance weekly after Brussels-based businessman David Bentley identifies the body found off Newlyn Harbor as that of his rolling-stone brother Graham. But John Latymer, the retired West Midlands CID Chief Superintendent whose services as a tour guide had taken him to Penzance just as the body was discovered, thinks the man whose body David Bentley was so eager to have cremated was actually that of boatman Euan Armstrong, missing from his Scottish village since August. Putting together a mysterious fight he witnessed between two Cornish fishermen—one of whom would soon join the false Graham Bentley in earth’s sweet embrace—with the testimony of Armstrong’s distraught wife, Latymer becomes convinced that Armstrong, a newspaper contest winner misthinking himself a journalist, was on the trail of a major story about dangerous waste products deposited in Solway Firth in a truly alarming manner. Unfortunately, nobody but Latymer is in a position to connect the violence in Cornwall with a disappearance from Dumfries; the police in both districts are satisfied that everything’s under control; and Latymer’s bride, who does little but complain about his absences from home, is even keener than whoever sabotaged his brakes for him to leave the case alone.

Competent, if never exactly surprising, British intrigue from Cook (The Slicing Edge of Death, 1993, etc.).