Dead men and missing girls… 4 stars

When out jogging around his extensive garden one evening, wealthy Charles Mendenhall is shot dead. Detective Inspector Liam McLusky is at first suspicious of Mendenhall’s son, who didn’t get on well with his father and seems keen to get his hands on his inheritance. But a few days later another man is killed, probably with the same gun, and it turns out he was a friend of Mendenhall’s, one of a group of men who are friends through their mutual enjoyment of painting (pictures, not walls!). Now McLusky must try to find out if something in the men’s background has led someone to be targeting them. Meantime Detective Inspector Kat Fairfield is annoyed to be given the job of tracking down a missing girl, the daughter of an Italian politician. Fulvia is legally an adult and normally the police wouldn’t have got involved unless there had been reason to fear that something may have happened to her, but when politicians are involved, cases suddenly get shoved up the priority list. But then another girl dies, and she had attended the same art college as Fulvia, so suddenly finding Fulvia takes on a more serious aspect.

This is a solid police procedural, the fourth and apparently final one in a series about Liam McLusky. I’ve read an earlier one, and this has the same strengths and slight weaknesses. The characterisation is good, especially of Liam himself – I wasn’t so keen on Kat, who seemed permanently grumpy. The main plot is interesting and I failed to work it out – there is a clue early on, but if you miss it then the ending rather comes out of the blue. Actually I did spot the clue, but the solution still took me by surprise, since it had never been mentioned again in the couple of hundred pages since it appeared. Helton often includes art and artists in his plots, probably because he’s a painter himself when he’s not writing. It always adds an extra element of interest – a good example of incorporating the “write what you know” principle into his stories. The secondary plot relating to Fulvia really seemed like an unnecessary distraction to me. It didn’t go anywhere very interesting, and merely served to add to the length of the book. It would have been a tighter and better read, I think, if Helton had just concentrated on the main case. There is a minimum of bad language – none that I can remember, in fact – and while Liam is not problem-free, neither is he an angst-ridden drunk.

However, there’s too much padding in terms of telling us everything Liam eats or drinks throughout the case, and his on-off relationship with his girlfriend didn’t feel as if it added anything to either the story or Liam’s character. Liam mostly follows procedure, which I always prefer, but occasionally steps over the bounds in ways that I didn’t find altogether credible, and unfortunately that applied particularly to how the book ended, meaning that the last few pages left me rather less enthusiastic than I had been up to that point.

Overall, though, the strengths outweigh the weaknesses. The beginning, when we follow Charles Mendenhall in the lead-up to his death, is very well done, creating a great atmosphere of tension and mild creepiness. The investigation is slow, but keeps a steady pace so that it holds the attention, and there are enough surprises along the way to keep the reader guessing. I’m sorry that Helton seems to have stopped writing these – in fact, his most recent book (in a different series) was published in 2017, so it looks like he may have stopped writing altogether which would be a pity. His books may not be ground-breaking, but ground-breaking can be over-rated. Instead, they are solid well-worked-out mysteries, well written, with interesting plots and, in this series, a detective I’d be happy to spend more time with.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Severn House.