Lynda La Plante

In volume 4 of the series, Jane Tennison has been recently promoted to Detective Sergeant and is working in CID in Peckham, south London. She and a colleague are called to a scene where a woman has been found collapsed among piles of rubbish - this being the 1979 Winter of Discontent when the bin men were on strike for weeks - and they discover the woman has been strangled. Soon afterwards, another woman's body is found although her social status and age are very different from the first victim and the cause of death is also different. Only the proximity of the bodies leads the detectives to link the two cases, but then a third victim turns up and a certain missing man is implicated. Only Jane doubts his guilt, being less hampered by the stereotyped views and prejudice of most of her male colleagues.

I enjoyed this volume more than the previous book. Jane was more confident and more instrumental in solving the crimes, though she still has to cope with outrageous 1970s male chauvinism as well as her own tendency to be a bit gung-ho and stubborn about following up leads discounted by her so-called superiors. Her sympathy to women and a child affected by the crimes is well drawn. I also liked her colleague Paul Lawrence, a superb forensic officer who would also suffer from extreme prejudice if his sexual orientation were known to his male colleagues. The other police characters are all one dimensional.

The story is a little predictable in terms of who the real culprit is and the ending, but there was far less clunky writing than in the previous volume and only one actual anachronism that stood out and jarred - the use of "Listen up". I googled it after finishing the book and it seems that it was actually used in the 1970s but in the USA military, so it would not have been current in 1970s Britain. But overall, I would rate this at 4 stars.… (més)

In volume five of the series Jane is assigned to the Flying Squad otherwise known as the Sweeney (as in the famous 1970s TV series). As usual she faces sexism from colleagues, and a superior who undermines her and denies her credit for the good detection and leads she uncovers. An added complication is that she discovers she is there as an experiment to see if a woman can tone down the rampant behaviour exemplified by the unit's styling themselves as the characters from the blockbuster film, 'The Dirty Dozen '. So the stakes are high when she sets out to prove herself.

The team are dealing with a bank robbery as she arrives and the novel concerns the subsequent investigation. Jane's character is the most fully realised, and her empathy with members of the public, as well as her insights and intelligence are well portrayed. As before, she can occasionally make mistakes through her dogged determination to crack the case. The other characters are more one dimensional. Jane makes alliances with two of them - the forensic officer Dabs, with whom she has a natural affinity from her previous friendship with the expert Paul Lawrence, and the only black officer, Lloyd, another outsider who has had to fight for acceptance. However, there isn't an accurate portrayal of the racism such an officer would have had to deal with, unlike, for example, in the TV series 'Life on Mars' which did attempt to show the racism endemic in the 1970s as well as the sexism.

The book is a bit pedestrian compared to the previous volume. There is a lot of repetitive detail about interviews etc, some carried out by colleagues. It does pick up when Jane's immediate boss begins to value her contribution as opposed to trying to seduce her. I wasn't totally convinced by something which happens near the end, as the perpetrator was not a hardened bank robber but rather one of their associates, and I do find it lazy writing to kill off a character instead of dealing with the fallout from certain events. I can't be clearer without spoilers, but it is also not quite consistent that a certain person is able to give Jane key information if they really were studiously turning a blind eye to what their family were doing. It is also left unexplained why a certain key witness' testimony is ignored if the person who ignored it really doesn't merit Jane's suspicions. So for these reasons, I would rate the book at 3 stars.… (més)

Having enjoyed the Prime Suspect series on TV years ago, I decided to try a set of three books about Jane Tennison's early career though hadn't realised when I bought them that they were books 3 - 5 rather than 1 - 3. So Tennison is already working in CID when the story opens. She is soon caught up in an IRA bomb attack at Covent Garden underground station in London and her actions in trying to apprehend the culprit and help the wounded initiate most of the action of the subsequent story.

I found the character of Jane to be very naive compared to her later incarnation, although perhaps that is to be expected. However, certain flags were obvious to me such as 'bumping into' someone she hadn't seen for years just as she is leaving the hospital room of an injured woman who is the only one to get a good look at the bomber. There were a few red herrings along the way to divert the reader's suspicions, but I found it very surprising that Jane's colleagues, in some cases experienced Bomb Squad officers, also took things at face value and didn't advise that it wasn't a good idea to go ahead with her plan to rent out a room in her new flat. Considering the two conversations about sleeper agents, it seems odd that they took a lack of criminal record as a good enough recommendation for a particular character. Jane stumbles from one blunder to another, and is never given credit when she comes up with several key insights that ultimately save lives, so it is surprising that she eventually does rise to the rank seen in the Prime Suspect TV series. She also comes across as a much more fragile person than in the TV series though we do see the start of certain habits such as drinking and smoking.

From a writing point of view, I found some of the text clunky and pedestrian with too much stage direction and unnecessary detail at times. This tended to flatten the narrative and rob it of tension and suspense at points where there should have been real involvement in the story. There was a subplot concerning trafficked underage girls, which didn't go anywhere and eventually fizzled out, being mainly used to land Jane in hot water with her superiors.

There were also various anachronisms which jumped out and jarred the suspension of disbelief, such as the use of "landline" several times to describe a wired-in telephone. As the latter were the only phones around, apart from car phones owned by the wealthy which I think must have been radio controlled, it stood out. Similarly, expressions such as "too much information" didn't sound right for the 1970s and having looked that up since, it didn't appear till the late 80s or enter general use till the 1990s. There were a few others like that, which jolted the flow as they didn't belong in a book set in the 1970s. So given the various niggles, I would rate this at 3 stars.… (més)