It's probably important to say from the outset that I enjoyed this book a great deal. Yeah, yeah, that's important to say in any book review, but it's especially important here because the general approach is one that could lead potential readers to wonder. Let me explain.

Helen Carter is a police officer, a Detective Sergeant in Edinburgh, and while that shouldn't seem very surprising to us today in our enlightened times, she's stuck in 1978 and that was a long time ago indeed when it comes to attitudes towards women. She faced a lot of prejudice and misogny in the first novel, 'The Uniform', and the ability and dedication she displayed in solving a brutal case in that book and an equally brutal one in 'The Evidence', has tempered that a little but it hasn't gone away. She's not only fighting crime, she's fighting the era in which she lives and that's a harder battle to win.

Of course, this isn't all about the sexism of a bygone era, but that's one backdrop for events to unfold in front of. Helen is driven to succeed as a cop despite the odds, but work is hard even if we disregard that entire gender angle. She works fourteen-hour shifts as a routine so she's constantly tired. She doesn't smoke but pretty much everyone else there does, so the station is a fog of cigarette smoke. When cops are off the clock, they end up down the pub because there's an expected behaviour that everyone falls into as an almost inevitable default.

Another problem is that the Edinburgh in 1978 was not a particularly nice place to live. While she's now comfortably well off because her father's inheritance included a house she never knew about that she can now rent out, that's just another way for her to feel apart. This is a city where poverty and violence are commonplace and that's where the police are needed most. The characters we meet live in mouldy and rundown houses or blocks of flats. They have little education so their pleasures are base and they find the paths to crime or domestic abuse easy ones to take. Just to literally hammer that point home, Helen is woken up every morning by demolition crews taking care of the remains of a burned tenement across the street.

And, of course, there's very little technology anywhere. Some characters don't even own a television, an almost impossible thought to the youth of today who grow up with one in their back pocket. Crucially, of course, this applies to the police force too. Think of your favourite shiny Hollywood crime dramas where everyone has large clean desks with huge touchscreens and a whole slew of forensic tools are a thought away. All the heroes of these shows have to do is run prints or plates or DNA and there's a killer waiting for them to pick up and lock up. Helen Carter has precisely none of that. Her job is knocking on doors or rooting through boxes of paperwork or asking questions until someone punches her. It's not sexy work, but it's what she and her colleagues have to do to get the job done.

What all this means is that we almost feel like we should put on gloves to read this book. We don't see the pages stained with nicotine and wrinkled from spilled whisky, maybe even spattered with blood, but that's sometimes a surprise. Jodie Lawrance captures this recent dark age magnificently, even though she's not old enough to remember it, and that's why I have to point out that, against all the odds, this is a thoroughly enjoyable book. I'm not quite sure what she does to achieve that, but it may tie to a sense of hope that pervades her lead character. If Helen Carter can survive this and play her part to bring the dismal seventies into a more enlightened era, then the least we can do is buy into that mindset. Sure, it all sucks right now but it's going to get better. The bulky computers that show up late in this novel that almost nobody knows how to use and even fewer take seriously underline that.

Each book in this series can be read as a standalone, with a single new case that's introduced early and solved late, so you don't need to have worked through the earlier volumes to appreciate this one, but I would recommend that you do. If we see each novel as a TV episode, then they add up to a wider series and there are other story arcs that are going to take that long to bear fruit. Helen's father was a chief inspector, but he may well have been on the take and that mystery is still ongoing. There are hints at a romance in Helen's life, beyond her relationship with an alcoholic that ended after the first volume, in all three books, but it hasn't taken hold and it may never do. That's refreshing. New mysteries show up here too, like why the seventy-year-old confirmed bachelor suddenly agrees to marry Helen's mum.

Those subplots don't resolve here, but they move forward and I'm sure they'll continue to do so over as many books are needed to complete the series. That's fine. We can concentrate on the story in this new episode, which revolves around an unclosable heist that may now be closable. It took place eight years ago and the police know that it was perpetrated by Jimmy Osbourne, who murdered one police officer in the process and seriously injured his partner, before vanishing off to Spain, with no firm evidence to warrant anything to be done about it.

However, Jimmy is back in Scotland and the seriously injured partner, Loughton by name, is eager to be the one to bring him in and take him down. Given that he appears to be playing with the police, the rest of the force is happy to help, though they're not entirely convinced that Loughton can do it without the case falling apart because he didn't follow protocol. What's more, new crimes are being committed and there's a strong possibility that Jimmy was involved, in both the jewellery heist and the stabbing. How can the police take him down and, in doing so, close not one case, but three?

I've enjoyed all three books in this series, but for different reasons. To my mind, this is the best of them for a number of reasons. The mystery is complex enough to keep us guessing but not so complex that we don't have a chance of figuring it out. I solved the equivalent mystery in the second book far too quickly but not here. The clues are all there, but I had to follow Helen through her very analogue investigation to put them all together. The characters continue to deepen too, whether that's Helen herself or some of her colleagues, like DI Jack Craven and DC Terry McKinley. They have their own stories and mysteries and Lawrance ensures that we care about them without them getting in the way of the main story.

The only problem with this book is that it ends and there isn't a fourth book ready to leap into. It will be published at some point and I expect a fifth and a sixth and on out. For now, just like Helen Carter in her violent, poverty-stricken and misogynistic late-seventies Edinburgh, I'll have to be patient. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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