A Killing Coast

April 30, 2012
In Rowson’s slow-moving seventh contemporary procedural featuring Det. Insp. Andy Horton (after 2011’s Footsteps on the Shore), Horton and his fellow Portsmouth police officers investigate what at first appears to be the accidental death of a woman found floating in the English Channel. Two teenage girls and a 40-year-old woman from the area have been reported missing, but the autopsy reveals that the deteriorated body, which must have been in the sea for some time, is not one of them. Meanwhile, Horton looks into his own mother’s disappearance in 1978, though one has to wonder why it’s taken him so long to pursue this highly personal cold case. Meticulous police work leads Horton to a “particularly callous and ruthless killer” as well as theft and blackmail. Stock supporting characters do what’s necessary to further along the plot, which includes a few unexpected twists.

June 1, 2012
DI Andy Horton (Blood on the Sand, 2010, etc.) misses the mark when he mistakes a murder for an accidental drowning. Even though Colin Yately was dressed in a woman's ankle-length dress when his body was pulled from the Solent, Horton has no reason to suspect foul play in the retired postman's death. It isn't until the next day that Dr. Clayton gives him the bad news: Yately was bashed over the head and deliberately drowned. By then, it's too late to seal up Yately's apartment on the Isle of Wight, which Horton inspected but left unguarded. Sure enough, when DCI Bliss sends him back after a thorough bollocking, he finds a manuscript missing. Also missing is Victor Hazleton, a retired office manager who reported seeing lights on the water the night Yately was most likely murdered. Horton had been distracted by his interview with Adrian Stanley, a retired police officer he thought might be able to shed some light on the disappearance of Horton's mother some 30 years earlier. So he hadn't pursued Hazleton's lead. This omission earns Horton a further reprimand from Bliss, herself distracted by Operation Neptune, designed to thwart a possible caper aimed at the superyacht Russell Glenn has moored in Portsmouth Harbour. When Hazleton turns up in the trunk of a Morris Minor belonging to Yately's friend, retired lawyer Arthur Lisle, Horton begins slowly but carefully to probe the web of crime that links these seemingly innocent pensioners. A generally satisfying puzzler whose hero takes a little too long to connect the dots.

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April 1, 2012
It's been decades since DI Andy Horton's mother disappeared when he was just a child. He's never been able to find out what happened, but now he's finally tracked down a cop who worked his mother's case all those years ago. But he has little time to follow up, thanks to another in a string of violent burglaries and the discovery of the body of a man, clothed in a dress, floating in Portsmouth Harbour. Then a second body is found, and Andy discovers a link between this body and the dead man in a dress. As Andy and his team investigate, they find disconcerting links to a local law firm, an antiques scam, and a long-ago murder that set off a chain of events whose repercussions are being felt even today. The plot is multilayered, twisted, and complex, and while it takes concentration to keep all the characters and clues straight, readers who persevere will be rewarded with a surprising conclusion and a satisfying read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)