The Monk: A DS George Cross Mystery

Sullivan keeps his hot streak alive with the crafty fifth case for neurodivergent detective George Cross of the Avon and Somerset police (after The Politician). Cross’s colleagues call him in when they discover the corpse of Brother Dominic, a monk who’d recently been reported missing, tied to a chair in the woods near his abbey. Dominic was well-liked, and there are no obvious suspects, so Cross and his partner, DS Josie Ottey, probe his life before he became a monk. They learn that his birth name was Alexander Mount, and that he had a reputation as “a fixer, a conciliator, a defuser,” in the words of one friend. Then Cross catches a lead when he realizes that Mount was the brother of an old acquaintance. As the investigation unfolds, Cross also deals with the unexpected reemergence of his mother, who abandoned him and his father when Cross was five years old. The whodunit at the novel’s heart crescendos with a solution that’s surprising, logical, and well clued, and Sullivan once again shrewdly deploys humor to counterbalance the grimness of the central crime. This is contemporary crime fiction at its finest. (Apr.)