Deadly Force

British detective chief inspector Bill Slider probes the death of a colleague in the sturdy latest installment of Harrod-Eagles’s long-running series (after Easeful Death). Well-liked Notting Hill police constable Peter Bentley has been found dead with his head bashed in near a canal on Slider’s turf in the West London suburb of Shepherd’s Bush. Slider enlists his sidekick, detective sergeant Jim Atherton, to help investigate, and they find no shortage of possible explanations. The absence of Bentley’s wallet suggests he may have been the victim of a robbery, but the brutality of the crime points to a more personal motive. Slider and Atherton cast suspicion on Bentley’s adulterous wife, Sandy, while also considering a well-known local criminal and digging into the tragic death of Bentley’s sister a decade earlier for possible clues. Harrod-Eagles’s evocative prose (one of Slider’s superiors displays a smile “like sunlight glinting off a coffin lid”) and skill at capturing policemen’s fraternal humor (London beat cops call members of the detective branch “bananas, because they were yellow, bent and went round in bunches”) elevate the familiar plot. It’s a diverting whodunit. (May)