DI Ridpath #10
This series is constantly one of my top two British crime thriller, police procedural, reads
M.J Lee has created a unique character. DI Tom Ridpath has two jobs. His main job is in the Major Investigation Team of Greater Manchester Police. But following treatment for cancer he was seconded to the Corner as her investigator, a job he is still doing four years later, although he is increasingly back in the fold of the police.
The uniqueness of the situation sees Ridpath investigating deaths for the Coroner that sometimes haven’t raised suspicions of the police.
In this case a high death rate at a Residential Care Home for the elderly.
At the same time Ridpath is tasked, by the police, to look at the case of a fourteen year old boy who went missing during the Covid lockdown, and was never found.
Why was the case so badly handled in the first place?
It’s a hot chalice for Ridpath, often seen as an outsider, and an ideal scapegoat, could this be somebody engineering his failure.
Covid took its toll on the police and they were slow to respond, officers went sick and the continuity of the investigation was shattered. So what can the new investigation find, without highlighting just how badly the police had messed up, without Ridpath taking the blame.
Meanwhile a serial killer is lounging in a high security hospital plotting his escape. Ex medical examiner Harold Lardner wants revenge on the people that put him in jail. That includes everybody at Greater Manchester Coroners Office.
The residential care home starts to crop up in Ridpaths missing persons case, and his inquiries for the Coroner are being thwarted by the care home management.
Surely the two cases can’t be related.
Lardner is plotting and pulling strings like a master puppeteer, but surely he can’t have been playing the long game and somehow be responsible for the disappearance of the boy four years ago.
This is a great story in a great series.
The main character, Ridpath, struggles with his work life balance. A a widowed father with a fourteen year old daughter his home life is fractious. As a cop with two jobs, which comes with often conflicting loyalties, work is also fractious.
Ridpath and the recurring characters, the background storyline running through the series, and the story within each book makes these books unmissable.
Pages:394. Publisher Canelo Crime
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