Review of Blind Fury by LaPlante

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/661312160 Linda LaPlante writes excellent police procedurals in several series. This one features DI Anna Travis whom we saw earlier involved in a ridiculous affair with her boss, Superintendent Langton who continues to have a presence and influence on the investigations. He's also a very bright detective as we see in one scene.

The scenes with Cameron Walsh were a bit too reminiscent of "Silence of the Lambs." Walsh is a killer Travis had jailed years earlier but he's obsessed with her and claims to be able to help with their investigation into the deaths of young foreign workers.

You get a real sense for the plodding tediousness of a difficult investigation with few clues. It's definitely not a thriller but seems to me to be a more accurate depiction of how frustrating and repetitive an investigation can be. I rather liked the repeated interviews, tracking down and interviewing witnesses, the interplay among the characters, and the tedious seeming lack of progress that many other reviewers decried. I'm not so wild about the romantic relationships that Travis finds herself in constantly but which often lend little to the overall plot. An attempt at building up the character, I suppose.

A thriller it's not, but as a realistic portrayal of the frustrations of police investigations, it's top-notch.