Overview
The three police officers who head up Castlemere's detecting team work together like the parts of a well-oiled machine. Detective Superintendent Frank Shapiro is a thirty-year man who has finally found a detective inspector with the instincts and discipline to complement his experience - Liz Graham. Liz, the first female detective on the force, is now one of its most respected senior officers. Her detective sergeant, the volatile Cal Donovan, possesses a reckless courage that is his greatest strength and his most dangerous weakness - and something Liz finds as indispensable as it is infuriating. A vicious gang of thieves has hit the city, and the easiest way to snag them is to infiltrate their organization. Can Donovan pull off the assignment without losing his cover - or his life? Liz goes undercover in a different way when she decides to act as bait for a baffling serial rape case, but is the department - and her marriage - strong enough to handle the results?
Synopsis
The three police officers who head up Castlemere's detecting team work together like the parts of a well-oiled machine. Detective Superintendent Frank Shapiro is a thirty-year man who has finally found a detective inspector with the instincts and discipline to complement his experience - Liz Graham. Liz, the first female detective on the force, is now one of its most respected senior officers. Her detective sergeant, the volatile Cal Donovan, possesses a reckless courage that is his greatest strength and his most dangerous weakness - and something Liz finds as indispensable as it is infuriating. A vicious gang of thieves has hit the city, and the easiest way to snag them is to infiltrate their organization. Can Donovan pull off the assignment without losing his cover - or his life? Liz goes undercover in a different way when she decides to act as bait for a baffling serial rape case, but is the department - and her marriage - strong enough to handle the results?
Publishers Weekly
Castlemere, an English city of about 80,000, isn't usually a hotbed of crime. But in a 48-hour stretch, its coppers have to deal with ram-raiders (a British version of smash-and-grab robbers); a serial rapist; a dog-fighting ring; and a train robbery. In the fourth Castlemere procedural (following A Taste for Burning), Bannister's appealing police trio exhibit their diverse strengths and weaknesses: Detective Superintendent Frank Shapiro is a 30-year veteran with experience and instincts enough to know when to give his staff free rein; Detective Inspector Liz Graham is bright and ambitious and quite likely to be promoted off the Castlemere force; and Detective Sergeant Cal Donovan is the maverick who's too unorthodox to climb the ranks but too valuable to be dismissed. Many procedurals read as if the police had the luxury of tackling each case as a separate entity, but Bannister depicts her force coping with several major crimes at once. She does so brilliantly. While Shapiro coordinates and oversees operations to trap the ram-raiders, both Graham, on the rapist's trail, and Donovan, trying to infiltrate the dog-ring, undergo serious trials by fire. Taking her already accomplished characterization to new levels of depth and intensity, Bannister creates deeply suspenseful situations, resolves them with panache and melds the various themes into an extremely satisfying whole. (Aug.)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Castlemere, an English city of about 80,000, isn't usually a hotbed of crime. But in a 48-hour stretch, its coppers have to deal with ram-raiders (a British version of smash-and-grab robbers); a serial rapist; a dog-fighting ring; and a train robbery. In the fourth Castlemere procedural (following A Taste for Burning), Bannister's appealing police trio exhibit their diverse strengths and weaknesses: Detective Superintendent Frank Shapiro is a 30-year veteran with experience and instincts enough to know when to give his staff free rein; Detective Inspector Liz Graham is bright and ambitious and quite likely to be promoted off the Castlemere force; and Detective Sergeant Cal Donovan is the maverick who's too unorthodox to climb the ranks but too valuable to be dismissed. Many procedurals read as if the police had the luxury of tackling each case as a separate entity, but Bannister depicts her force coping with several major crimes at once. She does so brilliantly. While Shapiro coordinates and oversees operations to trap the ram-raiders, both Graham, on the rapist's trail, and Donovan, trying to infiltrate the dog-ring, undergo serious trials by fire. Taking her already accomplished characterization to new levels of depth and intensity, Bannister creates deeply suspenseful situations, resolves them with panache and melds the various themes into an extremely satisfying whole. (Aug.)Kirkus Reviews
When a crime wave hits Castlemere, Superintendent Frank Shapiro's Queen's Street cops rush headlong to put themselves in the line of fire. Inspector Liz Graham, noting that two recent rape victims both resemble her, wants to have herself staked as bait for their attacker. And loose-cannon Sergeant Cal Donovan, fresh from thwarting a daring train robbery, goes undercover with a pit bull to get a line on whoever dumped a rotting canine corpse on Shapiro's front porch—only to find that he's hit the jackpot via an invitation to join the ram-raiders who've been crashing their 4x4 into shopfronts and scurrying off with whatever they can carry. In an ordinary genre writer's hands, both the undercover ops would generate some nail-biting tension before their predictable success; but both of the Castlemere coppers get badly burned when their masquerades are so successful that they backfire, leaving Graham and Donovan violated and traumatized. Bannister's especially persuasive in dramatizing Graham's combination of outrage, sympathy, and obsessive determination to get the man who's now added her to his list.A notch below A Taste for Burning (1995)—which places it just below the highest ranks of the British procedural.