Disordered Daggers : Between Two Evils by Eva Dolan (2020)

[gervase_fen]

 

When a doctor is murdered at home in his cottage in a quiet village, DI Zigic and DS Ferriera look for connections to his recent place of employment – an immigration centre recently hit by scandal which the doctor had played a part in exposing. Meanwhile a convicted murderer has been released on a technicality and has Ferreira in his sights…

This is a solid police procedural featuring Eva Dolan’s investigative cop duo DI Dushan Zigic (third generation Serbian-English) and DS Mel Ferreira (Portuguese-born immigrant to the UK in the 1990s). It’s always tricky jumping into the fifth book of an ongoing sequence and working out how much past is prologue. (I once tried the twelfth book in an ongoing series, and was never engaged by any of the back stories.)  The only crucial bit of background knowledge needed here is that both of them served together in the recently disbanded Hate Crimes Unit of Cambridgeshire Police – Eva Dolan efficiently sketches in the power dynamics of the rest of their superiors and juniors.

 The novel is set in a very recognisable August, 2018, with protesters wearing Momentum t-shirts gathering outside the detention centre run by an outsourcing contractor that scrupulously enforces NDA contracts. I was gripped throughout, although I was pulled up when I realised just how young fictional policewomen are these days (“She’d been friends with his son at school, the pair of them bonding over their strict parents and an unfashionable love of Star Trek Deep Space Nine.”)  A strong contender to make the long lists announced later today.

Update at 12 pm - And it did indeed make the Steel Daggers longlist.