NEED YOU DEAD

His 13th case looks as close to routine as it ever gets for Detective Superintendent Roy Grace (Love You Dead, 2016, etc.). But looks aren’t everything.

Hours after learning that Greg, her married lover who was about to divorce his wife and rescue her from her controlling husband, isn’t really about to divorce his wife and isn’t even named Greg, hairdresser Lorna Belling’s unexpectedly violent final confrontation with the faithless adulterer leaves her dead and her killer working feverishly to erase all traces of his involvement with her. Although Corin Belling does everything he reasonably can to draw suspicion that he’s killed his wife, Grace and his team from Major Crimes keep working the case and soon uncover other suspects: unsuccessful salesman Seymour Darling, who’s been convinced that Lorna scammed him ever since his payment for her MX5 vanished into cyberspace, and independent financial consultant Kipp Brown, who forensic evidence indicates knew Lorna much better than he’s willing to admit. While Grace awaits further developments, his own domestic drama continues apace with the burial of his first wife, Sandy, a train wreck of a woman who ran off a decade ago to a secret life in Germany, and his own trip to Munich to pick up Bruno, the 10-year-old he unwittingly fathered but has never met, and bring him back to his own home. It’s just as well that Grace has some distraction from the murder of Lorna Belling, because the more deeply his team digs into the case, the more likely it seems that the killer was someone inside the Sussex Police.

Despite some serious information overload—including a glossary of police terms, a chart of police ranks and insignia, and a superabundance of police characters—James has never forgotten how to make the pages fly. If a supercharged procedural is what you crave, fasten your seat belt.