Corpse Road (DCI Harry Grimm, #3) (edició 2020)

This is the third in a series set in Yorkshire, England and featuring Detective Chief Inspector Harry Grimm, 40. Harry has a fearsome countenance. His face was “crafted from wounds he’d sustained from an IED when he was in the Parachute Regiment, and then honed over the years into something just short of being hard and horrible enough to make a grown man shit himself.”

Twenty years ago, Harry found his mother dead and 10-year-old brother Ben devastated and unable to recover from it. Ben became dependent on drugs and was now in Bristol Prison. Harry has been looking for their abusive, murderous father ever since, and it is an obsession for him. It is also destroying him, in the words of his boss, Bristol Detective Superintendent Alice Firbank, who sends him to Yorkshire for “secondment.” She wants him to “do a bit of reevaluation, that kind of thing.”

Thus, Harry has now been working in “Herriot country,” for the past three months. (The dales are familiar to many as the setting for the television series, “All Creatures Great and Small,” which was based on the books by the Yorkshire vet, James Herriot. It had been filmed around Wensleydale and over in nearby Swaledale, and this is where Harry now headed a team he has gotten to like very well indeed.)

Harry works with the surprisingly competent and affable PCSO (Police Community Support Officer) Jim Metcalfe, PCSO Liz Coates, Detective Sergeant Matt Dinsdale, and Detective Constable Jenny Blades.

In this installment, the team confronts a bizarre murder of a woman out camping overnight in Swaledale near the old Corpse Road. Her name is Kristy, but the name Stacy has been carved onto the forehead of her dead body.

In alternate chapters we hear from the murderer, a man who calls himself the Ultimate Gentlemen and who is an “Incel” or involuntary celibate. They feel they have a right to sex but have been denied it because of all the “Stacys and Chads” - attractive, successful people who ruin their chances for happiness. As you might guess, a dead “Chad” is found next, and the team races to find the culprit before there are more Stacys and Chads who are tortured and murdered.

Evaluation: While this mystery wasn’t as well constructed as those in the previous books, it is enjoyable getting to know Harry and his team and watching them at work. ( )