From Publishers Weekly
Finally identified after six months, an exhumed skeleton sets East Midlands DI "Jacko" Jackson peeking into closets?some awkwardly close to home?that contain their own. The victim, Dwight Curtis, an American writer living in Amsterdam, could have been his own best story: he juiced up old, real murders for pulp magazines. On a quick trip to the Netherlands, where he receives the invaluable assistance of Sergeant Fran Van Acrie, Jacko learns that Curtis was in England to confront a WWII labor-camp doctor?and that Curtis's original informant has vanished. As the trail leads to two British hangings, one old (an execution) and one new (supposedly suicide), Jacko casts a suspicious eye at a superior who was originally on the case and who now wants the skeleton back. But what particularly worries Jacko and Fran, who's been brought in to help, is that the doctor Curtis was investigating might be in the Midlands and up to his old experimental tricks. Besides delivering an intense, tightly woven police procedural, Palmer (Blood Brother) raises questions about what happens when theoretical liberalism is tested. Such questions sharpen the edge of an already effective story.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Detective Inspector Jacko Jackson of the CID is dead tired of his current case. Nine months ago, a skeleton was found in a shallow grave in his jurisdiction, a remote area of England's East Coast. There were no clothes, no identification, no internal organs, nothing to help Jacko figure out who the victim was or why he was murdered. Then a Dutch dentist sees a report about the crime in a medical journal and recognizes the dental work as her own, leading Jackson to his first break. The victim was a tabloid journalist stalking the story of his life: Nazi war criminals given sanctuary in Great Britain, grisly medical experimentation using smuggled illegal immigrants, even corruption in the CID. Forced to stretch the limits of legality to save lives and stop the killer, Jackson finds himself less troubled than he expected by the moral questions his tactics raise. Palmer's trademark blend of world-weary cynicism mixed with a healthy dollop of humor gives this straightforward procedural its zip.
George Needham
