More Crime 'Reviews' - Catherine Aird and Peter Swanson

 Catherine Aird - Past Tense

I think I said before that I'd taken a short break from reading Catherine Aird – not because the books aren't good, but because reading them one after another ‘glutted’ me of the characters and places. Anyway I've resumed now.

Aird (to use her professional name) had a long career as a writer, and it’s interesting to see what does and doesn’t change as I jump years, even decades, up and down in the series. My latest – Past Tense – was published in 2010.

Some things, of course, are eternal: Crosby and Dr Dabbe the pathologist still drive too fast, Leyes still does evening classes and imparts pearls of wisdom from them in his chats with Sloan,  Sloan bites his tongue when talking to his boss, is believably and actively happy in his married life and is still not entirely convinced young Crosby is the stuff detectives are made of. 

Meanwhile the outside world has moved on. Where an earlier book had the student sit ins of the 70s, 2010 is in that odd period where people had mobile phones but didn’t always switch them on or carry them (there are probably still people who do this but I don’t think I actually know any).

The story kicks off with the death (by natural causes) of an elderly lady in a very upmarket care home, and her niece-in-law being contacted as the nearest known relative, physically speaking (her husband being abroad for work). 

She’s never met the aunt, had no idea she was living so close, but gets on with organising and attending the funeral - and is surprised when another unknown relative turns up last minute for the service, claiming to be the woman’s grandson.

Meanwhile the care home is broken into, a vase smashed but nothing actually taken - and then a young woman drowns in the river and Dabbe is sure she was thrown rather than jumped…

All of which ties together nicely at the end when Sloan solves it in his usual smart but unflashy way. 

Peter Swanson – The Kind Worth Saving.

This is the third book I’ve read by Swanson I think – others were a novella and Rules for Perfect Murders. I realised quite early on that The Kind Worth Saving follows on from The Kind Worth Killing, which I haven’t read, but chugged ahead anyway. 

Saving works perfectly well without, but I should caution that if do as I did you will get spoilers. I might still read the first one though. Swanson is very readable, even in the heads of people who you wouldn’t necessarily want to be in.

In Saving we have two timelines – one in the third person, set years before when two teenagers conspired to kill a third, and the other in the ‘now’, written in the first person and seen through the eyes of Henry Kimball, former police officer and teacher.

Having had to leave both those jobs for different reasons (Kimball is a deeply flawed but fundamentally decent person, in the best noir tradition), and now working as a private investigator, he takes on the case when a former pupil of his contacts him because she thinks her husband is having an affair. She even thinks she knows who with.

After the case ends in tragedy though, Kimball starts to think he’s been set up. So naturally he starts digging into the past and very nearly gets himself killed...