Tim Sullivan’s entertaining and popular series of murder mysteries proves no profession is safe from murderous impulses. His latest, The Bookseller, certainly lives up to previous entries. You might not think a bookseller, particularly one whose specialty is rare books and first editions, would rile anybody up to the point of murder, but Ed Squire appears to have done just that. As in the series’s previous books describing George’s investigations – all named for the profession of the victim, the first being The Dentist, another presumably anodyne career – the story is awash in red herrings.
In this book, Detective Sergeant George Cross, somewhere on the autism spectrum, again burnishes his reputation as an investigative bulldog. Once his jaws latch onto a case, he isn’t letting it go until he’s absolutely and completely satisfied the right perpetrator is brought to justice. This is good for justice and frustrating for his colleagues in the Avon and Somerset Major Crimes Unit, who meanwhile have been barking up a great many wrong trees. Of course, George and his partner, Josie Ottey, would find it easier to quickly hone in on the proper suspect if the victims didn’t tend to go through life accumulating a significant array of enemies.
On the evening the story opens, Ed Squire waits at the shop for his elderly father, Torquil, who decades earlier started the book-selling business they run in Bristol. When Torquil returns, he finds Ed dead in his first-floor office. The police arrive, there’s the usual information gathering, and George discovers the shop assistant, Ed’s niece Percy, locked in the bathroom, terrified and in shock.
Over the course of the investigation, the detectives uncover serious family problems – financial and interpersonal. It begins to look as if the bookshop was struggling. There is bad blood from a painful breakup with Torquil’s first business partner. Ed has antagonised larger and more established London booksellers by accusing them of inflated prices. Worst, he sold stolen copies of some famous (in collector circles) documents written by Christoper Columbus, and the unhappy Russian oligarch who paid £2 million for them wants his money back.
The Russians and his gangster-ish henchmen bring a sense of real menace to the proceedings. Only some clever police work by Ottey and Cross’s team reveals the extent of their rather persistent presence and how they have been staking out the Squires’ shop.
Sorting out this mess takes George’s brand of patience. Meanwhile, he’s beset by his own problems. DS Ottey has received a promotion. She’s now a Detective Inspector, outranking him. He fears she’ll be moved somewhere else in the policing system, and he’ll be assigned a new partner. The main reason it may not happen is that everyone recognises she’s the only person who’s been able to work with him. As a reader, I don’t want it to happen, either. She’s an interesting character and a perfect foil for George.
More significantly, George’s father, Raymond, has a stroke and will need a long course of rehabilitation. This family demand prompts George to tender his resignation, to take effect after the Squire case is concluded. No one, especially Raymond, believes it will be a good idea to have George in the caregiver role, but changing George’s mind is never easy. The relationship between George and his father – and in more recent books, his mother – is one of the many charms of this series. Like Ottey, the parents know they can’t interact with their unusual son in the usual ways and they’re models of effective coping.
If you read the previous book in this series, The Teacher, you’ll recall how a police officer seconded to Avon and Somerset from Kent sexually harassed and ultimately attacked Cross and Ottey’s researcher, Alice. Alice is away on a training course now, studying to become a detective herself, but the trial of her attacker is also in this story. She’s a bit of a wreck, obsessing about her testimony and worrying the man might go free, but her bravery, given the importance of reporting such a crime, is duly noted.
Tim Sullivan is crime writer, screenwriter, and director, and his George Cross series benefits from that background in both I-didn’t-see-that-coming plotting and the development of a diverse, never boring cast of characters.
You might also like Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent and The Monk, again by Tim Sullivan.
Head of Zeus
Print/Kindle/iBook
£15.99
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
