The Broken Afternoon - Simon Mason

 After The Goodbye Coast last month, here we are with another excellent crime novel with an unnecessarily silly central premise.   The Broken Afternoon is the second in a series featuring two detectives with the same rank and almost identical names working out of the same police station.   Theoretically possible but in practice ridiculous.   Ray and Ryan Wilkins are neither rivals nor brothers in arms.   They have each been loaded with black and white opposite attributes.   Ray is a procedure man, black but middle class and university educated.   Ryan is white, underclass, school of hard knocks, a gut-driven investigator.   Ryan is a single father, living with his gobby sister, a single mum.   Ray's wife is pregnant with twins, constantly ill and therefore demanding.   Ryan is not actually a cop when The Broken Afternoon begins; he has been sacked for whatever happened in the previous novel, A Killing in November, and working nights as security on a van-for-rent business on a bleak industrial estate.   One night he comes across an old friend, Mick Dick, once a promising boxer, now an ex-con down on his luck.   Ryan gives him a break.   The next he hears, Mick is found in a ditch, victim of an apparent hit and run.   He leaves behind a partner and a little girl.   So obviously Ryan has to look into things.

Meanwhile a young girl has been abducted from outside her nursery school.   The new Superintendent at Aldgate Police Station in Oxford, Dave Wallace, "hard bastard of the old school", puts golden boy Ray Wilkins on the job.   Meanwhile Wallace is reviewing Ryan's file, and calls him to discuss possible reinstatement.

This is a very different Oxford from the cloistered world of Inspector Morse, more akin to the Oxford of Mick Herron in Reconstruction and the Zoe Boehm novels.   The missing girl is from the privileged class, Mick Dick from the basement of the underclass.   It was Simon Mason's evocation of this multi-faceted Oxford that kept me hooked.   Mason has an effortless style and keeps just the right note.   His characterisation, overall, is excellent; even the paedophiles who are inevitably involved are granted human traits.   I still don't like the Wilkins duality - they could simply be two cops, dissimilar in everything but the need for justice - but I really enjoyed the book, which stimulated as well as entertained, and will happily read more of Mason.

The Return - Hakan Nesser

This, the second Inspector Van Veeteren novel, dates from 1995 and struck me as slightly showing its age.  The story is good - a two-time murderer is released from his second term only to turn up dead and dismembered in a ditch some months later.  I know what Nordic Noir fans are thinking - so did I, but it wasn't.  As usual, Van Veeteren slips out of the action as soon as possible and cogitates obliquely elsewhere.  This time the trick was a hospital operation.  Some critics have seen this as an homage to Daughter of Time or whatever the last Morse was called.  Personally, I think Nesser has stuck himself with an outsider as a hero who has so few teamwork skills that he could never in real life attain such high rank.

I didn't much like the flashbacks, either.  Too easy a device, and too corny.

Of the three Van Veeterens I have read over the last couple of months, The Return comes a distant third.  The mystery wasn't that complicated, the victim is someone you never empathise with, and no one we care about ever comes under any threat.  To be fair, though, it does have the best title of the three.

Laurie Thompson supplies his usual high-grade translation.