Bristol detective DS George Cross investigates the suspicious suicide of a young woman.
DS George Cross can be rude, difficult, and awkward with people. But his unfailing logic and dogged pursuit of the truth means his conviction rate is the best on the force. An outsider himself, having been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, DS Cross is especially drawn to cases concerning the voiceless and the dispossessed.
Now, Cross is untangling the truth about a young woman who died three days ago. With no fingerprints, no weapon and no witnesses, the Bristol Crime Unit are ready to close the case. The coroner rules the woman had a long history of drug abuse. But her mother is convinced it was her daughter has been clean and sober for over two years.
DS Cross is determined to defy his bosses and re-open the case, even if it costs him his career. Soon he is mired in a labyrinth of potential suspects – but can he solve the case before his superiors shut it down for good?
 

My Review:

This is my third read in the DS George Cross series, after The Dentist and The Cyclist, and so far I am enjoying the whole thing very much. So much so that I have zero plans to stop until the current, or for that matter any future, end.

The series so far, and the stories within, are all mysteries with a bit of a thriller edge. Not that Cross and his colleagues get themselves in physical danger, as they usually don’t deal with those kinds of cases. Cross generally picks up cold cases or, as occurs in this case, recent cases that the original investigating officer decided were closed where Cross sees that something does NOT add up.

Or, as it turns out in this particular case, adds up to a LOT of dead bodies that no one else noticed.

It’s the pacing of the story that picks up that thriller edge. At first, Cross often has very little to go on, but is doggedly going at it anyway, over and over again. Where a previous inspector saw little worth bothering with, Cross sees details that are either missing or contradictory. And, as usual, he’s right.

Which doesn’t ever mean that it’s easy for him to determine precisely what is wrong no matter how certain he is that something is. The case itself unravels slowly – at least up until the desperate race at the end. The tension early on often comes from either within Cross himself as he refuses to settle for less than the truth, or from the actions of his superiors who press him to either charge a suspect he’s not certain of or drop a case altogether even as a clock dimly ticks somewhere in the background.

At the same time, there’s usually a personal element to the events surrounding the mystery. In this particular case there are two. Cross has a difficult time dealing with change, and also with clutter and untidiness. A combination that comes to a head when his father, a hoarder, takes a tumble inside his own, extremely cluttered apartment, and needs physical therapy AND a safe and uncluttered home to return to. Navigating their separate needs and responsibilities pushes Cross to reach out to his colleagues for help, a HUGE undertaking for the extremely private Cross.

That the temporary care facility in which his dad is placed causes the entire police department to reconnect with an old, respected colleague during her final days AND provides Cross with the breakthrough in his case manages a kind of trifecta as it affords Cross the rare opportunity to open himself up a bit, gives a former officer the recognition she deserved along with a beautiful, heartfelt sendoff AND presents Cross with the final puzzle piece he needed to get the full measure of justice for a victim who finally had everything to live for but made the grave mistake of placing her trust in someone who should have been worthy of it but absolutely was not.

Escape Rating A+: I was originally intending to read this a couple of weeks ago, but I put it off for a bit. Not because I wasn’t looking forward to it, but because I was listening to Inside Man by John McMahon, which is a really, really close readalike for this series. So close, in fact, that I was a bit worried about conflating the two which wouldn’t do either of them the justice they each deserve. Books absolutely do deserve separate consideration because both series are terrific. However, just because both protagonists are on the spectrum doesn’t mean that their stories or their characters are exactly alike.

Far from it. Gardner Camden seems to be a bit more aware that the world is not set up to suit him and that he needs to suit it to get ahead. That he has a young daughter who loves him, relies on him and has more than a few of the same traits helps him to fit into the world a bit more smoothly than George Cross does. (Notice I said more smoothly, not that Camden is actually smooth at fitting in. But he’s more consciously trying and a bit more successful at it – or at least a bit less abrupt about it. It’s a matter of degree.)

One of the interesting personal aspects of this entry in Cross’ series is that we get a much clearer picture of the probable cause of that difference. Camden’s mother did her best to help him understand how he did and didn’t fit into the world and gave him tools for figuring that out for himself. Cross’ mother abandoned her son and her husband when George was five because she couldn’t cope with either her husband’s gentle parenting of their son or her own inability to deal with the boy’s many differences.

It’s turned these two detectives, both with similar jobs and similar approaches to those jobs, into much different people in ways that mostly do not reflect the differences between the US and the UK.

This particular entry in the Cross series, in addition to a fascinating and convoluted case – as Cross prefers – tells the reader quite a bit more about Cross as a person, not just how he moves in the world but how he sees himself. That the backdrop of the story includes a complaint against Cross by a senior officer who bullied Cross when he was a junior and now resents every single time Cross investigates one of his cases and discovers yet again that he didn’t investigate much at all does a terrific job of showing how Cross thinks of his work as well as the various ways in which his colleagues, superiors and rivals think of him.

At the same time, the way that Cross enlists the aid of his colleagues to help him with his dad’s apartment opens the character up in many ways AND shows how his work environment is, well, working on him on a more personal level. So the investigations in his first three cases so far have had a lot of similar aspects, but the protagonist himself is definitely changing.

I’m certainly looking forward to more of both, more twisty cases and more of Cross reaching out beyond his own boundaries, in the books ahead in this series. Next up is The Politician. As the titles of this series represent something about the victim of the case, I might just be looking forward to that one even more than usual!

Detective Sergeant George Cross returns to solve the case of a mangled body on a construction site and uncover a life of illicit drugs in the second book in Tim Sullivan’s internationally bestselling series

DS George Cross has unique and unmatchable talents. He uses a combination of logic, determination and exacting precision to get answers where others have failed for families who have long given up hope. So when a ravaged body is found in a local demolition site, it's up to Cross to piece together the truth from whatever fragments he can find.

From the faint tan lines and strange scars on the victim’s forearms, Cross meticulously unravels the young man's life, delving into the world of amateur cycling, an illicit supply of performance enhancing drugs, jealousy, ambition and a family tearing itself apart.

Cross’s relentless pursuit of the truth and eccentric methods earn him few friends. But just as the police seem to be nearing a conclusion, he doubles back. Could it be the biggest mistake of his career?

My Review:

I fell hard for the first book in this series, The Dentist, so I’m ever so grateful to the publisher Atlantic Crime for bringing this series out in the US even if (and especially because at the same time) it’s been out in the author’s native UK for several years and is very popular there. I hope the same turns out to be true on this side of the pond, because, so far at least, the series is awesome – especially for mystery fans who love a detective with a unique perspective AND a thoroughgoing, intricate, well-executed, police procedural.

With an emphasis, perhaps on the executed part of that formula, as the stories begin and end with murder, AND, at least so far, the murder(s) at the end turn out to have been the murder(s) at the beginning after all.

Intrigued? I hope so. I certainly was.

Detective Sergeant (DS) George Cross fully admits that he’s on the autism spectrum, even if everyone around him tiptoes on eggshells about saying that out loud or even, sometimes, admitting it within the confines of their own heads. But Cross fully admits it, and even – on very rare occasions – hangs a lampshade over it or attempts to make a joke about it. His jokes land badly if at all, because he doesn’t get the social cues or understand the social taboos about when a joke is funny vs. too soon vs. in really poor taste – in general and not just in reference to his own circumstances.

(I get the feeling there is a part of his diagnosis in childhood – or at least other people’s reactions to it – that traumatized Cross and that he’s hiding from himself, but we haven’t quite got there yet because Cross isn’t ready to go there yet. And may never be.)

The case here begins with the discovery of a dead body – as murder mysteries so often do. It also begins with a pissed-off jobsite foreman, as quite a few mysteries do. The body has been discovered in the midst of a demolition site, and its discovery stops said demolition in its tracks. As such events do.

The body has NO identification on it, and does not match any missing persons case. It’s equally clear that the dead man didn’t kill himself, but he could have died either by accident or homicide. It’s evident that the dumpsite was not the killsite, and he absolutely could NOT have neatly wrapped his own body in plastic sheeting and carted it there. Somebody did something they shouldn’t have done, either to cause the death or to cover it up or both.

In order to figure out ‘whodunnit’ Cross must first determine who it was done to. And that’s where Cross starts looking for a thread to pull. At this blank canvas of a beginning, he doesn’t know which thread will be the right one. He’s just looking for a place to begin.

That the only thread he has turns out to be the correct one is a clue that is so deeply buried that not even Cross sees it at first. But in his single-minded need to dot every ‘i’, cross off every ‘t’ and check off every single box – he’ll get there in the end.

No matter how many times along the way his superior tries to close the case because said superior is “almost sure” they’ve got it wrapped. Cross never settles for “almost sure”. Only absolute certainty will do, and he’ll keep working until he finds it.

After all, Cross doesn’t care what his boss thinks. He only cares that the guilty can’t escape justice.

Escape Rating A+: This was, literally (in multiple ways), the perfect book to read at the end of a four-day Zoom meeting marathon. I needed to get back into my routine, but my brain had the consistency – and mental capacity – of a toasted marshmallow. I desperately needed a book to both suck me and AND wake my brain up, and I knew this book would deliver.

Which it most definitely did.

There are multiple things going on in this story, and this series, that I absolutely love, along with one that could have gone terribly wrong but so far hasn’t, so this was a win all the way around.

Let me explain…

Mysteries are one of my comfort reads. Not that I like to see people dead – even in fiction – but because the heart of a mystery is the return to order after it’s been broken. There’s a catharsis in that restoration of order out of the chaos. It feels good to see justice triumph and evil get is just desserts – or at least as much of those desserts as the situation allows for.

My reading catnip is competence porn. I enjoy seeing smart characters getting a job done well – whatever that job might be. Mysteries, with their outright requirement that a puzzle get solved, lend themselves to that catnip – although they’re not the only kind of story that does.

And I do love me a good police procedural with a quirky but cohesive ‘cop shop’ vibe, and this series is certainly building one of those. Although it’s a bit more twisted than that as the ‘cop shop’ that surrounds Cross has NOT been built with him as the center – except in an ironic way. The cop shop vibe in this series is built around dealing with, managing, and coping with Cross.

Which is where the thing that could go terribly wrong but hasn’t so far comes in. DS Cross is on the autism spectrum. That is not, as it was with Sir Gabriel Ward KC in A Case of Mice and Murder, the reader working out explanations that are not explicit in the story. Cross, like FBI Agent Gardner Camden in Head Cases and Miranda Chase in her series, knows and states that he is on the autism spectrum.

The danger that could occur, but so far hasn’t in any of those series, is a trope referred to as “autism is their superpower”. Because that can go very wrong, very quickly, and get very toxic. WHICH IS NOT HAPPENING HERE!

That doesn’t mean that the predilections, tendencies, and coping methods that Cross uses to deal with being himself in the world, don’t aid him in his work, because they certainly do. His hyperfocus is certainly a part of what makes his ‘solve rate’ so high. But they also harm his work, as is clear from the way the cop shop that surrounds him, well, works.

But it’s not one-sided. He is adapting, and so are they, and there’s growth on both sides – along with understandable frustration on BOTH sides.

The start of this particular case, now that I think about it, is a bit similar to the start of the case in the first book, The Dentist. (It’s looking like all the books in this series are titled for the identity of the victim, but we’ll see.)

The openings are similar in that initially, both victims are unidentified and the first part of the puzzle is figuring who they were so Cross and the team can figure out who had motive to do them in. So there’s a bit of a case before the case, but they do blend into a seamless whole – it’s just that the whole starts at an earlier point than mysteries often do.

However, since we’re all here for the puzzle – including Cross and the team – having a bit more of it is actually a good thing. As is this second installment in DS Cross’ series, from that mystery within a mystery beginning to the very satisfying end. And the even more surprising end after the end – which will hopefully intrigue you enough to try this series. It certainly works for this reader!

All of which means, of course, that I’ll be back next month with the third book in this series, The Patient. It’s looking like this series is going to be my ‘reading treat’ after I finish my regular deadline each month – and they absolutely are a treat worth looking forward to!