Sifting through a surfeit of clues

When Eastvale Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot, on loan to the short-handed Yorkshire precinct, gets called to investigate, she's in bed with a hunky young man she barely recognizes ("Her clothes lay strewn across the hardwood floor with the kind of carelessness that suggested desperate and wanton abandon"). Her memory of how she got there is a blur of "fizzy blue drinks with umbrellas" and "flashing lights."

Annie traces the victim to Mapston Hall, a nearby residential-care home, and identifies her as Karen Drew. That morning, staffers tell her, a woman visitor came and took Drew, a paraplegic, out to the cliff walk.

Meanwhile, Annie's former partner, crusty Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, is working with Detective Constable Winsome Jackman to investigate the brutal rape and murder of a 19-year-old woman. She's been found among the tangled back alleys of a neighborhood known as the Maze in Eastvale. Appropriately, the Maze reminds Banks of Jack the Ripper's Whitechapel.

Soon, the two investigations are in full swing in different precincts. Each has a roster of suspects, witnesses, and a colorful contingent of investigating officers. The sheer number of characters and complexity of the plots feels a bit overwhelming at first. But Robinson creates compelling characters that make you care, and by page 50 I couldn't put the book down. After a series of stunning twists - what might, in the hands of a less skilled writer, have felt like coincidences - the investigations converge.

For fans of the rich British storytelling tradition of authors like P. D. James, or readers who just enjoy a great yarn, this is an immensely satisfying novel in a stellar series by a master of the art.

Another writer steeped in the British crime-writing tradition is Jacqueline Winspear. "An Incomplete Revenge" is her fifth novel featuring Maisie Dobbs, a smart, pragmatic private investigator and psychologist with extraordinary empathic sensitivity. Where her countryman Sherlock Holmes might have examined bits of tobacco, Maisie draws inferences from the nuance of a smile or a raised eyebrow.