I've enjoyed each of Jodie Lawrance's 'Helen Carter' books and this fourth one is probably the best thus far, following very much in their footsteps but doing what they do just a little better again. It might hint at something slightly different with the extra word in the title, as if three of them is an extravagance only now earned, but it's highly consistent with the others, simply with the worthiest mystery to solve yet. As always, it would work well as a standalone novel but adds a little more for readers who have read the whole series.

It seems a little redundant to praise the mystery in a crime novel but, while there's been a mystery in each of the four books, Lawrance also dedicates a lot of time to her characters. That was notable in the first book, 'The Uniform' which inherently had to introduce a bunch of them and set a series in motion all at the same time. Those characters have grown in each instalment, but the mysteries have varied in depth. I figured out whodunit in 'The Evidence' quicker than I'd have liked, but I was kept agreeably on the hop in 'The Suspects', even with plenty disclosed at the outset.

However, this time the mystery is very clever indeed. Sure, there's a missing woman, as the title is eager to tell us, but we're not sure for the longest time if a crime has even been committed. She's Ella White and she's vanished from her apartment, where she lived alone, the cops called in by an anonymous tip. There's circumstantial evidence to suggest foul play—a little blood, suggestion of more having been cleaned up with bleach—but, as the cops look into it, there's also circumstantial evidence to suggest that she may have just left, because she'd done it before and had just quit her job to boot.

The crucial piece of evidence is something that's initially only unnerving to DS Helen Carter. There is only one book on Ella's shelves that's not under a coat of dust and it's by Oliver Stanton, a local author of true crime books, this one about the Button Killer, a murderer so called because he had a trademark of cutting buttons off the clothes of his many victims and secreting them inside their throats. This is notable to Helen because her father, when he was alive and a cop himself, was the man who caught this serial killer, after a period of obsession about the case that impacted her life as a young child. Mark Landis has now spent the past decade and a half in prison.

It's even more notable to us, because we've had the benefit of reading the prologue. Someone has just thrown Oliver Stanton off a train, very deliberately as an act of revenge for something that he said in his book. It doesn't happen in Edinburgh and it's initially decreed to be suicide, so it doesn't come to Helen's attention as quickly as it might. However, when it does and she realises the ticket serving as a bookmark for the Button Killer book on Ella's shelves was to the same train, then she's forced to reevaluate a whole lot of things.

Maybe Stanton didn't commit suicide. Maybe he was murdered. And, if he was murdered, how does that crime tie to Ella White, who may not have simply left Edinburgh after all. Maybe she was also a victim of the Button Killer and, if there's a Button Killer out there, continuing the crimes he did back in the early sixties, does that mean that Mark Landis, the Button Killer who's been locked up for a long time without ever admitting guilt in any of those murders, is actually an innocent man? This is a lot for Carter to work through and all of it keeps us on our toes. Even when I finally caught something important that I probably should have seen sooner, I still plumped for the wrong man.

Lawrance does a lot here and the thoroughly down to earth nature of policework in the Edinburgh of the late seventies actually underplays just how much she does. To DS Carter and her colleagues, there are at least three mysteries here that they need to keep individual focuses on, even though they also have to consider that they're all tied together. As one grows, because you know that the media is going to have a field day with it, that affects how they balance the three and how they're going to need to tackle them. I particularly appreciated the scenes where Carter has to visit Mark Landis in prison.

And, with all this going on, Lawrance manages to keep some attention on building her characters. I mentioned in previous reviews that the tone of the series is changing slowly and appropriately so. The first book, covering Carter's first case as a detective sergeant, almost seems now like a rite of passage for her, the means by which she gains at least some level of respect from her colleagues, a misogynistic bunch to say the least. That sort of nonsense has eased over time and with each case she solves, but it's still there to a degree, especially in her partner, DS Randall. The city is still grim but that tone is easing a little too as we head towards the eighties. The Thatcher years won't help but this world is evolving.

There's also plenty going on in Helen's life, outside the crazy long hours she's giving the force. The Button Killer case coming back to the fore is inherently personal for her, not just because her dad solved it, though that assumption is suddenly in doubt, but because she saw crime scene photos as a kid, her first and they're coming back to her now as nightmares. The murderer seems to have an obsession with her, even watching her in her apartment, and it's only going to get more personal. On a lighter note, she's connected with someone romantically, though she's apparently not aware that DC McKinley clearly likes her more than he's saying. It's all early days, of course, but things do move onward.

All in all, it's always good to see a series continuing to grow and when that series began in a unique way to begin with, it's even more heartening. This is the best novel yet for Helen Carter and Jodie Lawrance and I'm now eagerly awaiting the next one. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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