RUSTED SOULS

The 11th and final installment of Nickson’s Tom Harper series ties up all the loose ends and breaks your heart.

Harper is about to retire from the Leeds City Police, which he’s served for many years. He lives in a suburban house he bought after his wife, Annabelle, was diagnosed with dementia and could no longer run the Victoria public house; his daughter, Mary, who’s run a highly successful secretarial business since losing her fiance in the First World War, lives there with her parents, as does Annabelle's nurse, Julia. The last few weeks before Harper's retirement are filled with difficult and dangerous cases. Powerful Alderman Ernest Thompson, who’s being blackmailed over some letters he foolishly sent to the much younger Charlotte Radcliffe, asks Harper to recover them without publicity. As difficult as that case turns out to be, the problems caused by the group of former soldiers robbing jewelry stores are more serious, for they’ve carefully planned each robbery and gotten away clean in a matter of minutes until one of them kills a bystander. Harper, who uses a small group of trusted allies to investigate the blackmail, has trouble keeping things quiet when some of the young men in thrall to Charlotte start to turn up dead in what look like accidents. On top of that, the police expect a gang of female shoplifters and pickpockets to descend on Leeds, as they already have on several other cities. Despite all these trials and tribulations, dealing with Annabelle’s descent into her illness troubles Harper the most.

An excellent procedural paints a painfully accurate portrait of dealing with dementia.