Some Sort of Justice
By Peter Grainger
Union Square & Co., 2026, 439 pages, $30
In the 17th novel featuring the fictional Kings Lake Police in Norfolk, U..K, Peter Grainger has given us a marvelously complex procedural, full of suspense, danger, sticky moral choices, good writing, subtle humor, and some fine police work by an honest and competent team of detectives. It’s as satisfying a read as fans of intelligent detective fiction will find.
Some Sort of Justice is a novel about, among other things, politics. Not the partisan or electoral kind, but the career promotion, bureaucratic buck-passing, and butt-covering kind that can become perilous to all concerned when policework bumps up against parliamentary and even national security agendas that have nothing to do with “to protect and to serve.”
A word here on Cara Freeman. She’s the protagonist in this novel, and … is one of Grainger’s brilliant and memorable creations.
Higher-ups in these worlds hate embarrassing press more than Dracula hates sunlight and the True Cross. And there could be some very bad press indeed, not to mention some culpability, caused by the politically radioactive hairball dropped into the lap of Detective Chief Inspector Cara Freeman, head of the county’s murder squad.
This one starts when DCI Freeman’s boss, Harry Alexander, errand boy in this instance for the top of the police food chain, gives her a choice, which really isn’t a choice, to investigate the drowning death of Lord Freddie Thorpe in a pool at a country party. The original inquest found the death to be accidental. Clearly, a verdict that a disparate group of influential people wishes to stand, for reasons that become increasingly clear as the investigation progresses. But some dodgy forensics and some slipshod work by the original investigating team call the accidental death conclusion into question. The dearly departed’s sister, Lady Caroline Thorpe, wants a second look, and she’s not the kind of person one ignores, even though various organs of government would very much like to.
“I don’t begin to pretend I understand what has gone on with this case,” Alexander croons when dropping the hot potato on Freeman and her team, “It’s an unholy mess. I need someone who can sort it out and put it to bed without making a fuss.” No translation necessary. He could as easily and more honestly have said, “Bury this stink bomb in the back yard as soon as possible.”
DCI Freeman salutes and accepts the assignment. But she has no intention of delivering the “nothing to see here” whitewash clearly desired by the time-server brass. She’ll do a complete and honest investigation, though the heavens fall. In the process, she puts her career in jeopardy. In Grainger’s Norfolk Constabulary, the path to the chief constable’s office is not paved with competence and integrity.
A word here on Cara Freeman. She’s the protagonist in this novel, and, along with Detective Sergeant D.C.Smith (now retired after a 30+ year police career), is one of Grainger’s brilliant and memorable creations. The beating heart of the previous Kings Lake story has been the intelligent and amusing Smith. But in this one, Smith yields center stage to Cara, who is small of frame but possessed of a weapons-grade intelligence and unshakeable integrity. And she’s tough as a sheet-metal screw. Those who cross her or attempt to bully or ignore her come to regret it, usually on the spot. Scenes in which she deals with those who get crosswise with her are worth the price of admission.
As Freeman and her team start pulling strings on this hairball, it quickly becomes clear that there’s more here than some hopeless and hapless schlub, far gone in drink, drowning in a swimming pool when no one was around to haul his sorry carcass out before he breathed his last. The swells at the party lawyer up. Other attendees leave the country. Still others are threatened into silence.
The case officially becomes a Gordian knot when we learn that the spooks are involved in this one. A free society needs the secret squirrels to keep an eye on our enemies and protect us in a hostile world. But this lot is not obliged to follow the rules the rest of us are. Some of their rules of engagement would make a buzzard queasy. This case is no exception.
The presence of the spooks is because one of the party’s attendees is a member of Parliament who holds a sensitive position controlling arms sales and is doing just what shadowy, off-stage figures want him to. But there are these embarrassing pictures of the Honorable Member with some of his younger constituents in, uh, informal situations.
The case is finally resolved, with no help and considerable resistance from above. I’ll leave the details of how the motives are unpacked and the villains identified to those who read the book. I’ll only say — no spoiler alert necessary — that the solution justifies the book’s title.
In addition to the criminal case, in the book, Grainger gives us two sensitive profiles. One is of Cara’s caring for her mother, who is losing the plot thanks to dementia. The other is of the spook dealing with the final days of her aged father. These profiles are typical of the humanity that infuses all of Grainger’s work.
On the day I was finishing this review, I received an email from a friend thanking me for recommending Grainger’s work to him, which he described as literate, subtle, complex, satisfying, and permeated with a clever, understated sense of humor. He’s spot on, and is now binge-reading the series.
The Kings Lake series is also a saga and a serial. Each book covers an individual criminal case and can be read with enjoyment as a stand-alone. But greater enjoyment is to be had reading the stories in order, beginning with 2013’s An Accidental Death, as Grainger has created a cast of recurring characters who have their own stories and who grow and evolve from book to book. References to previous cases and to episodes in the lives and careers of the recurring characters pop up in all the books and would be confusing to those who come late to the Kings Lake story. There are significant developments in the lives and careers of this recurring cast in Justice, especially in the life of Detective Chris Waters, whom we first saw in Accidental Death as the raw rookie that Smith is assigned to train and mentor. Now a detective sergeant, Waters will soon be a detective inspector and a husband.
Amazingly, Some Sort of Justice is the first of Grainger’s novels to be published first in book form. Previously, his work was only available in Kindle and audiobook form. Those who comply with my strong urging and begin the series will be glad of the experience and puzzled by what took paper and ink book publishers — now doing the honorable thing — to take so long to recognize and publish a writer of such surpassing quality.
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