The Stranger You Know

March 17, 2014
Maeve Kerrigan and her colleagues pursue “the Gentleman Killer,” who poses his victims’ corpses in pristine white on beds of flowers, in Casey’s exciting if flawed fourth police procedural featuring the London detective constable (after 2012’s The Last Girl). For Kerrigan, the case hits dangerously close to home, both because of her kinship to the victims, who are also attractive, single, professional women, and because of the eerie similarities to the murder of 15-year-old Angela Poole two decades earlier, in which the prime suspect was none other than Kerrigan’s own infuriatingly sexist but often inspired partner, Det. Insp. Josh Derwent. Torn between conflicting loyalties, Kerrigan is tested even further when it starts to look as if she might be turning into a target herself. With its vibrant cast of characters, not least of them the feisty but fragile Kerrigan, this page-turner should reward series fans and newcomers alike—right up until the disappointing deus ex machina denouement. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, Zoë Pagnamenta Agency.

Starred review from May 1, 2014
A serial killer is targeting single women in London, and Detective Constable Maeve Kerrigan is included in the investigating team. But her colleague, politically incorrect and misogynistic Detective Inspector Josh Derwent, is definitely excluded: the murderer's MO of strangling his victims and removing their eyes echoes the killing of Derwent's first love, Angela Poole, 20 years earlier. Although Derwent was cleared of that crime and still tries to solve it, he fits the profile of the current killer and is considered a suspect. But not by Maeve, who disobeys orders from the top not to communicate with Derwent, with whom she has a prickly relationship, as she probes the cold-case Poole murder. Although one aspect of the killings is wrapped up rather hastily, this is more focused than the three earlier entries in the Maeve Kerrigan series, all solid police procedurals with exceptionally well-drawn characters whose relationships continue to develop in each entry. Derwent, a brilliant copper in Maeve's eyes despite his numerous personality defects, serves as a foil and balance for her, and, with him at the center here, this novel attains further complexity in the interplay of the police-force members. Prime crime fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)