Murder Mile by Lynda La Plante

          3.5 Stars

I'm beginning to think that Jane Tennison is rather an unpalatable character; with her overweaning ambition that leaves no room for humility or for deference to her superiors.  Multiple times through the book she directly challenges superior officers and in places completely undermines them.  No wonder she's been moved off the Dip Squad to yet another posting - this time in Peckham - to be honest I'm surprised she hasn't been pushed back to uniform for the rest of her career.

The main plot of this book deals with a series of murders that take place during the Winter Of Discontent of 1979.  The setting is well evoked and it did bring back memories of that time, so maybe they coloured what I was reading and made it all richer than it really was.  It starts with the finding of a young woman who has been murdered and dumped in an alleyway, as the bodies start to stack up it is up to DS Tennison, DI Moran and DI Gibbs to find the killer or killers - after all they can't all be linked, or can they?

The character development is good, as you would expect, but these are all deeply flawed characters.  The only one who comes out of the pages as being a "decent person" is the Forensics chap Paul Lawrence.  The best that can be said of everyone else is that they feel like real people with their own prejudices and peculiar little foibles that help inform their characters.  I did find that in this book I was becoming very exasperated with Jane Tennison and her obvious reluctance to follow procedure despite it being there for good reason.  There was also a little too much made of hunches in solving the crimes which I find to be a frustrating and lazy plot device.

What did spoil this book for me was the denouement.  The killer(s)'s reasons for murder are all a little bit fuzzy and read to me like they were not really responsible for the atrocities but liked the idea of the infamy.  Admittedly to kill another there has to be something not lining up as it does for the majority of the population but this is just so far fetched it did spoil the rest of the book for me.  It is left there and the assumption seems to be that their confession is to be believed but it left me with far more questions than answers.

There is a good amount of time spent on procedural work and the inner workings of the investigation make for good reading and do propel the story along nicely.  We are given little glimpses in to the private lives of Gibbs and Moran and a little more about Tennison.  These are only fleeting snatches of time though and don't really serve to move the story or the characters along very much.

I did sort of enjoy this book but I preferred it's predecessor Good Friday inordinately more.

I RECEIVED A FREE COPY OF THIS BOOK FROM READERS FIRST IN EXCHANGE FOR AN HONEST REVIEW.