THE FINAL BEAT OF THE DRUM

Spencer bids farewell to her best-known franchise.

It’s been years since retired DCI Monika Paniatowski has assembled her team in the public bar of the Drum and Monkey, and time has treated each member with a characteristically heavy hand. Jack Crane, rendered unfit for service when a suspect he was subduing gouged out his eye, teaches literature at the University of Central Lancashire. Colin Beresford, father of five, works a gentleman’s farm with his wife. Monika spends her days keeping company with Zubrowka Polish vodka, having given up her dream of becoming a grandmother. Her daughter, Louisa, has become Chief Superintendent Rutter, wildly successful but childless; her son Thomas is a Catholic priest; and his twin brother, Philip, is in a detention center awaiting trial for assault. Only Kate Meadows has done something noteworthy, leaving the force to become director of Overcroft House, a shelter for battered women. After years of finding pleasure in pain as Zelda, mistress of the night, she now protects women whose pain is anything but consensual. The murder of the husband of one of the shelter’s residents by someone skilled in the art of S&M presents one of the knottiest of Spencer’s patented heads-I-win, tails-you-lose dilemmas. If Kate’s alter ego is discovered, she’ll lose her post, but if the crime goes unsolved, the shelter may close. Spencer’s dialogue is crisp as ever: Monika notes wryly that Beresford’s home-brewed beer “tastes like a diabetic tomcat has peed on a dead hedgehog.” But readers will most likely anticipate missing Monika’s matchless gift for solving the unsolvable by means unimaginable even as they cheer her final victory.

Spencer gives Monika Paniatowski the send-off she richly deserves.