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Assistant Chief Constable (Operations) Desmond
Iles, suspected of murder by his superiors, his fellow cops, a would-be
avenger, and the telly, gets help from an unexpected but thoroughly logical
quarter.
When detective Raymond Cordovan Street, working undercover for
Iles and his chief of staff, DCI Colin Harpur (Close, 2017, etc.), was
murdered, Iles was convinced his killers were Paul Favard and Clifford
Jamieson. And when the pair were tried, acquitted, and then murdered, suspicion
naturally fell on Iles for executing summary justice himself—so much suspicion,
in fact, that the new television movie The Forgotten Murders does
everything it can short of libel to hint at his guilt. As everyone Iles has
ever met watches the show and draws their own baleful conclusions, an unlikely
defender of his reputation emerges: Ralph Wyverne Ember, aka Panicking Ralph, the
storied local drug lord and dabbler in many unsavory pies. In order to keep the
peace in his corner of England, Iles has deliberately gone easy on Ralph and
Mansel Shale, his drug-supplying counterpart and sometime partner, and Ralph is
convinced that if he were removed from power, any replacement ACC would be less
forgiving and more unpredictable. Ralph’s particular target is Naunton
“Waistcoat” Favard, the bereaved brother whose own particular target
he assumes is Iles. Surveying the damage done to The Monty, his beloved club and
aspiring social destination, following a riot during the broadcast of The
Forgotten Murders, Ralph
becomes certain that only one stroke can possibly rescue Iles: hiring a hit man
to make sure that Naunton Favard follows his brother and all those others into
eternity. Since Ralph, even when he cites The Waste Land, remains ineffably
clueless, complications are bound to arise.
Fans will know that the plot, such as it is, is nothing more
than a framework for this year’s addendum to the overbearingly insinuating
dialogues and self-deluding monologues James does better than anyone else in
the genre.
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