Alison Bruce, Cambridge Blue

Alison Bruce's Cambridge Blue, which was released in the U.S. in January of this year, was first published in the UK in 2008. This means, I hope, that in the last year the author's been hard at work on the second book in the series, because when it comes out, I want it. Cambridge Blue is a police procedural set in Cambridge and featuring DC Gary Goodhew, the youngest officer to ever make detective in Cambridge's Parkside Police Station. It's not that Goodhew is brilliant in a Sherlock Holmes sort of way, though he is very intelligent. It's more that he has a genius for noticing things, and a single-minded interest in his job, and a tendency to go off on his own and follow leads no one else has noticed. And besides, he doesn't sleep very much. He is an enigmatic figure, living a sort of double life which, one is surprised to discover, he shares the details of with the only significant woman in his life, his grandmother.

Goodhew is an intriguing character who's more than up to the task of anchoring this series. The secondary characters also show promise: Goodhew's exasperated superior DI Marks, his deeply unpleasant colleague Michael Kincaide, Mel from the admin department, who plays the sax and likes the wrong kind of men. Not one of them is superficially drawn.

In this installment, Cambridge is rocked by a perplexing series of murders by strangulation, all of them seemingly related to one another. It's not clear until the very end what's going on, and even then, when the details come spewing forth on the page, the story is a bit of a head-scratcher. One has to rethink the various clues to get things straight in one's mind. (I'm still not sure why one of the deaths had to happen.) Delightfully complex, then, both in its plot and its characters: none of them are what they seem to be; most everyone seems to be hiding something. You'll spend much of your time with the book wondering what this character or that is up to, from the prologue on. A very, very promising debut.