The Garden Party

November 19, 2012
As Turnbull’s third mystery featuring Det. Insp. Harry Vicary (after 2011’s Deep Cover) begins, construction worker Alan Brady arrives at New Scotland Yard with an enigmatic note, which he discovered in a wall during a demolition project, concerning the location of buried bodies. With only a vague map to go by, Vicary’s team in the Murder and Serious Crimes Unit meticulously sifts through clues and reconstructs macabre events that unfolded five years before. Turnbull balances the portrait of grueling police work with tender glimpses of the after-hours lives of Vicary and his subordinates, including Yorkshire-born John Shaftoe and Penny Yewdall. Police dogs provide valuable clues by unearthing human bones, even as it becomes clear that the apparently gangland-related crime’s few remaining witnesses are no longer safe. Other than police procedural fans, few will find much entertainment in such a grim read, though it should certainly disabuse anyone of romantic notions concerning a life of crime.

December 1, 2012
A very unauthorized interment provides a third outing for Metropolitan DI Harry Vicary (Deep Cover, 2011, etc.). Genteel East Finchley hardly seems the spot for a brutal crime. But when the workers restoring the wall in the back garden of a Victorian home in the neighborhood find a note in a bin liner stuffed between the courses of glazed Northern Red Brick, builder Alan Brady brings it straight to DC Frank Brunnie of the Murder and Serious Crime Squad. That's because the note gives the location of a box that the writer hopes "one day...will get a right burial," suggesting that its contents were once human. And so Dr. Shaftoe, the medical examiner, confirms when Brunnie and Vicary unearth a box of bones in a field outside of Ilford. Whose bones are they? And how did they come to be burned, boxed and buried? Vicary and Brunnie, along with DC Penny Yewdall and DC Tom Ainsclough, start with virtually nothing. But the builder gives them a name: Des Holst, a bricklayer who worked on the original restoration of the wall. Holst's widow, Pearl, has a temper. More importantly, she has a grudge. Des was once known as Ralph Payne, a prize blagger until he got religion in his old age and gave up thieving for honest labor. But connecting Des to a garden party in Bedfordshire in which two witnesses may have been killed for grassing up Arnie Rainbird will take Vicary's crew time, patience and, most of all, luck. Vicary, well up on grit but short on detection, spins the same facts over multiple witnesses and interviews.

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November 1, 2012
The third novel starring Detective Inspector Harry Vicary of London's Murder and Serious Crime Unit begins, in a manner reminiscent of a Kathy Reichs novel (or perhaps, more accurately, of the opening scene of an episode of Bones), with the discovery, between the walls of a building under renovation, of a note pointing its finders to the location of some apparently long-buried human remains. Are they connected to a seven-year-old incident in which two men vanished from a party held to celebrate the release of a notorious gangster from prison? Fans of the author's long-running Hennessey and Yellich procedural series should enjoy this book, although they ought to be warned that the Vicary stories are somewhat darker than the usual H&Y fare (the writing is a bit different, too: slightly sparser and more abrupt). Vicary, a cop with some shadows in his own past, is an increasingly interesting lead character, and each book in this new series is better than the last. If this trend continues, expect to hear much more about Vicary and his creator.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)