Just Jennifer

Blood Line by Lynda La Plante (Harper, September 2012)

Detective Anna Travis is still dealing with the death of her fiancé, prison official Ken Hudson, and is glad to have her job, the murder bureau’s Detective Chief Inspector to keep her mind off of her personal troubles.  Her colleagues are doing their best to help Anna through this difficult time, including Detective Chief Superintendent James Langton, Anna’s one time lover, now occasional friend.  The son of a court employee has gone missing without a trace.  As a favor to the father, Langton asks Anna to look into Alan Rawlins’s disappearance.  Alan, according to his father Edward, was a good son who would never go longer than a week without speaking to his father or his mother who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.  The missing persons squad has not found any evidence of foul play in Alan’s case, but it also doesn’t look like he has up and gone of his own volition, as his credit cards have not been used, nor has a large sum of money disappeared from the account he shares with his fiancé Tina Brooks.  Anna agrees to interview the family and Tina and while she too doesn’t find any evidence of foul play, she comes away from the interview with Tina that something definitely wasn’t right in the pair’s relationship and from the interview with Alan’s parents that she too would consider wanting sometime away from the doting, overbearing father and the mother now a prisoner of her own mind.  As Anna begins to focus on the minutia of the case, as she has nothing else, her colleagues, including Langton, begin to suspect that Anna is using her obsession with the investigation to cover the pain of her loss.  This carefully written mystery unfolds slowly, allowing only glimpses of what might have or could have happened and is full of conjecture and supposition, leading readers slowly down the winding path to the surprising conclusion.  The characterization is well done and the atmosphere moody and sad, a perfect backdrop for unveiling Alan’s fate and the events in his life leading up to it.