Guilty Waters

The Staffordshire moorlands provide the atmospheric backdrop for British author Masters’s briskly paced 12th procedural featuring Det. Insp. Joanna Piercy (after 2013’s The Final Curtain). Cécile Bellange, a French divorcée who lives outside Paris, comes to England in search of her 18-year-old daughter, Annable, and Annable’s traveling companion, Dorothée Caron. The two girls have been spending the summer hitchhiking around the country, but they have been out of touch for weeks, their last communication a postcard showing Lake Rudyard. Coincidentally, Joanna and her husband of nine months, pathologist Matthew Levin, are on holiday at Lake Rudyard, and she will soon assist in the hunt for Annabelle and Dorothée. Meanwhile, two brothers, Martin and James Stewart, find a note from the French girls inviting the note’s finder to meet them at the lake. Joanna’s domestic concerns lighten what is basically a sad, dark story. Readers will enjoy the neatly turned surprise ending. (Mar.)