When a woman is found dead in the boathouse café in the woods, the police quickly have a chief suspect. A witness saw a man and woman drive into the woods and half-an-hour later the man drove out alone. The witness is able to give the number of the car, and so suspicion falls on the driver, Chris Wade. The woman was Julia Mitchell, recently widowed and visiting her brother-in-law, Donald and his wife, Helen. Chris claimed he had simply offered Julia a lift back to Donald’s from his sister’s house, and it was she who asked to be taken to the boathouse café instead. When he left her there, he claims she was alive and well. But all the evidence points to him and he hasn’t helped his case by running off and hiding for a couple of days before coming forward. Inspector Lloyd and his partner, Sergeant Judy Hill, see little alternative but to charge him, but somehow Judy can’t help finding him believable…

Published in 1983, this is the first in what became a 13-book series before the author’s untimely death in 2007, aged just 59. It has the standard format of a police procedural with two likeable leads in Lloyd (he keeps his first name secret) and Judy Hill. Their professional partnership is spilling over into a romantic one, and I assume that will be explored further in later books. They work well together and their interactions are enjoyable – both are relatively angst-free, they seem to like their jobs and, so far at least, office politics are kept to a minimum. They’re just allowed to get on with the business of detection. This is back in the days before mobiles and the internet ruined police procedurals as a genre, even if they helped the police in real life. So Lloyd and Hill do their detection in the old-fashioned (and much more enjoyable) way of talking to suspects and witnesses, and trying to find discrepancies in their stories.

This one is quite short at just under two hundred pages, but that’s about the right length for the story. The suspect pool is very small – we really only meet Chris, Donald, Helen and a couple of others – so it could have got quite tedious if it had been stretched to full novel length. It’s definitely more substantial than a novella, though, and the plot is twisty and tricky enough to keep the reader on her toes, even if the small number of suspects makes it reasonably easy to work out who must have done the deed. What is much more tricky, and very well done, is how the deed was done. If Chris didn’t do it, why is all the evidence pointing in his direction? Even Chris can’t be 100% sure of his innocence – he has had a drinking problem since his wife was killed in a car accident a few years earlier, and that night he got blindly drunk so his memories are vague. But if he did do it, why? He’d never met Julia before that evening, or so he says.

Donald and Helen are the two other major characters. Their long marriage has quietly ground towards its end, mainly because Donald is a serial adulterer. Having stayed together for the children, they’re now both about ready to call it quits – all passion is long spent. Or is it? Helen suspects Julia of being Donald’s most recent lover – could she have killed Julia in a fit of jealousy? On Julia’s death, Donald inherits the property his brother had left in trust for her lifetime, so did he kill her for the money? Lloyd and Judy are convinced both of them are lying about something, but what and why?

I thoroughly enjoyed this one. The standard format, the old-fashioned methods and, most of all, the relentless focus on the crime rather than on the angst of the detectives reminded me why I used to love police procedurals. There’s just enough of the personal in Lloyd and Hill’s relationship to make them human, but not enough to overwhelm the story. Having abandoned many series recently because the tortured sex life of the ’tec seems to be more important to the author than the crime element, I appreciated this greatly, and can only hope McGown manages to maintain this perfect balance in the rest of the series, which I’m looking forward to reading.

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