BLOOD SUBSTITUTE

A husband-and-wife detective team (Cobweb, 2007, etc.) find themselves up to their necks in a hazardous case.

Patrick Gillard quit MI5 when the job became too dangerous for his family. Now he and his wife, author Ingrid Langley, are consultants for SOCA, a special branch of the police. When their friend DCI James Carrick is injured in a rugby match, the player who substitutes for him is an undercover policeman who shortly turns up dead, with the initials RK carved into his mutilated body. Carrick has just learned that his father Robert Kennedy, who supposedly drowned years before, may be alive; he asks the duo to sniff around quietly. At length they connect a recently released criminal named Kennedy to a ruthless gang operating over a wide area of England. Even though Patrick’s years in undercover assignments have made him a master of disguise, the gang somehow gets on to him, and Ingrid’s possible pregnancy and several hair-raising near-death experiences put the team in constant danger. Unwilling to leave Carrick on his own, they continue to investigate, even though the alternative to uncovering the truth may be to die trying.

Lashings of Bond-style derring-do cover up nicely for some slapdash plotting.