Crooked Street

December 19, 2016
Early in British author Masters’s tantalizing 13th mystery featuring Det. Insp. Joanna Piercy (after 2015’s Guilty Waters), Eve Glover phones the Leek, Staffordshire, police station to report that her financial-adviser husband, Jadon, is three hours late getting home from the accountancy firm where he works. It’s now past midnight. The cheery officer she speaks to tries to reassure her, but he’s thinking of the four S’s: “sex, sozzled, smash-up, sanity (loss of).” By morning, Jadon has still not returned home. Piercy takes charge of the ensuing investigation, assisted by her muscular sidekick, Mike Korpanski. Initially, the case doesn’t excite Piercy (“We’re reduced to searching for errant husbands. There’s bugger all else interesting going on”). However, a visit to Eve, who’s quite attractive, piques the detective’s interest and poses a series of questions, among them how well Eve really knew her husband. Piercy’s search for the truth takes her from a tidy but sterile suburban home into a seedier, sadder, and more threatening world.

January 26, 2015
The Staffordshire moorlands provide the atmospheric backdrop for British author Masters’s briskly paced 12th procedural featuring Det. Insp. Joanna Piercy (after 2013’s The Final Curtain). Cécile Bellange, a French divorcée who lives outside Paris, comes to England in search of her 18-year-old daughter, Annable, and Annable’s traveling companion, Dorothée Caron. The two girls have been spending the summer hitchhiking around the country, but they have been out of touch for weeks, their last communication a postcard showing Lake Rudyard. Coincidentally, Joanna and her husband of nine months, pathologist Matthew Levin, are on holiday at Lake Rudyard, and she will soon assist in the hunt for Annabelle and Dorothée. Meanwhile, two brothers, Martin and James Stewart, find a note from the French girls inviting the note’s finder to meet them at the lake. Joanna’s domestic concerns lighten what is basically a sad, dark story. Readers will enjoy the neatly turned surprise ending.

March 1, 2015

A picturesque Staffordshire lake, named for the poet Rudyard Kipling, loses some of its luster when it's the last place two teenage French tourists are seen one summer evening. Annabelle and Dorothee left Paris to travel through England the summer before college and ended up at Rudyard Lake, where they stayed in a bed-and-breakfast run by Mr. Barker, a caretaker who could give Norman Bates a run for his money. When two local boys find a hidden note from the girls on a popular rock-climbing peak, they do a bit of amateur sleuthing before reluctantly calling DI Joanna Piercy and her team. With no bodies and only the unsubstantiated worries of the girls' mothers back in France, it's a difficult case to investigate, but Joanna's gut tells her that Annabelle and Dorothee met an unfortunate end. Juggling her new role as the wife of the local medical examiner--who wants to start a family--Joanna works tirelessly to retrace the girls' steps before the trail went cold, all the while keeping a careful eye on the squirrelly Mr. Barker. VERDICT While the plot may feel somewhat pedestrian, readers looking for a straightforward, no-frills police procedural will enjoy Masters's solid 12th series installment (after The Final Curtain).

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2015
When a pair of French teenagers disappear after staying at small B and B on Rudyard Lake, Staffordshire Detective Inspector Joanna Piercy (The Final Curtain, 2013) gets the case. Named after Kipling's famous poem, the Mandalay Hotel attracts casual vacationers as well as fans of the late Victorian writer. Annabelle and Dorothee's last postcard to Annabelle's mother said that they had arrived at the lake and had recently taken up letterboxing, a hobby in which participants collect stamps from the letterboxes they find hidden in public places. Were the girls being followed by an obsessive letterboxer? Or does the odd owner of the hotel where they were last seen know something about their whereabouts? The leads for Piercy and her team run hot and cold, with old-fashioned observation cracking the case. On the home front, newly married Piercy and her pathologist husband discuss expanding their family. This is the twelfth in the well-regarded procedural series. A nurse by trade, Masters is also the author of the Martha Gunn series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

December 15, 2016
Jadon Glover, who is (according to his wife, at least) a successful professional man with an open-book past, has disappeared. His wife, Eve, is worried. DI Joanna Piercy and her partner, DS Mike Korpanski, treat this as a normal missing-persons case, until they begin to see signs that the missing man isn't the fellow his wife thinks he is. For starters, he doesn't work where Eve thinks he works; in fact, he has a source of income he keeps hidden from Eve, and for good reason: it's legal, but it's also dangerous and rather slimy. Soon Piercy and Korpanski realize this is about as far from a normal missing-persons case as you can get. The latest in the Joanna Piercy series is a tightly plotted mystery depending, in roughly equal measures, on its sharply drawn characters and its intriguing story to pull readers in.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)