The Heights

In the arresting first chapter of Bilal’s complicated second Crane and Drake mystery (after 2019’s The Divinities), a child is kicking a nylon bag on a London Underground train when a heavy object “wrapped in dirty cloth and what looked like newspaper” rolls out of the bag. The train’s passengers begin to scream once they realize it’s a severed head. Cal Drake, a former police detective who has formed a private investigation service with former pathologist Rayhana “Ray” Crane, gets a call from a police colleague who informs Cal that the head was wrapped in a newspaper carrying an article about a case Cal was involved in four years earlier. Cal joins the search for a killer. Meanwhile, Cal and Ray look into the disappearance of a young woman studying at the London School of Economics. Each of these investigations is merely a doorway into a convoluted conspiracy involving murder, money, and international crime. The protagonists’ backstories intrigue, but aren’t enough to make them three-dimensional. Bilal writes well enough to suggest he can remedy this defect next time. Agent: Euan Thorneycroft, A.M. Heath (U.K.). (Apr.)