Undercover

August 6, 2012
James’s tongue-in-cheek 30th mystery featuring Det. Chief Supt. Colin Harpur and Asst. Chief Constable Desmond Iles (after 2011’s Vacuum) takes the feuding pair to London to investigate a badly failed undercover operation conducted by another police force. Sgt. Tom Mallen, under the alias Tom Parry, infiltrated the drug-dealing gang run by Leo Percival Young with apparent success until the night he was shot and killed. Court transcripts, witness statements, detectives’ notes, and newspaper clippings punctuate the briefing Harpur and Iles receive from the Home Office’s Maud Logan Clatworthy, who Harpur suspects is one of those brilliant Oxford types Iles so resents. Young fills the role normally played by crooks and series regulars Mansel Shale and Ralph Ember. Dyspeptic rants from Iles and Harpur’s barely veiled retorts can’t conceal that they approach the case with their usual insight and thoroughness. Agent: Euan Thorneycroft, A.M. Heath.

September 15, 2012
The 29th appearance of Harpur and Iles, Britain's most irresistible duo since crumpets were first paired with tea. Tom Parry isn't really Tom Parry, thug, lowlife and drug-lord wannabe. Tom Parry is actually Tom Mallen, happily married father of two, a police sergeant doing undercover work to ferret out bad guys. His infiltration into Leo Percival Young's gang seems to be going well. Leo trusts him enough to send him along with three others to kill Justin Scray, #3 man in the gang hierarchy, who's been pilfering drugs, clients and funds for his own use. But when Tom, not Scray, winds up dead, the Home Office decides not only that Tom was set up to die, but that his assassin was someone from his precinct. Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur and his boss, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles, are called in to investigate. As they study witness interviews, a gang member's taped confession, surveillance footage and autopsy notes, Harpur doggedly keeps at it while trying to ignore the slurs heaped on him by Iles, who will never forgive him for sleeping with his wife. It turns out that Tom's against-regulations birthday visit to his son, as well as the uncooperativeness of various enforcement agencies, all contributed to his downfall. These revelations cause Harpur to consider the investigation a failure and Iles, typically, to accept kudos for the completion of it. Nobody demonstrates the similarity between criminal reasoning and cop reasoning better than James (Vacuum, 2011, etc.).

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Starred review from September 1, 2012
Gifted wordsmith and yarn spinner James offers another satisfying installment in his respected Harpur and Iles series. But while the subject matterthe brutal murder of an undercover copis dark and sobering, James' black, outrageously offbeat humor will induce guilt-tinged laughs. Experienced cop Tom Malley goes undercover to infiltrate a local drug ring and gather evidence to bring the ring leader to trial. But someone has discovered Tom's real identity, and the result is catastrophic. Harpur and Iles are brought in by the UK Home Office to discover who betrayed Malley; the Home Office thinks it may have been one of Tom's own police colleagues. The story is told via flashbacks tracking Tom's time with the drug ring, and the flashbacks are juxtaposed against details of the current-day investigation by Harpur and Iles, an effective storytelling and shiver-inducing tool when readers already know that Tom will die and can see just when things begin to go horribly wrong. James is one of Britain's best and most creative crime-fiction writers, and his gripping, deftly written, darkly funny Harpur and Iles series demands space in all mystery collections.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)