Death in Dark Waters (Ackroyd & Thackeray Mystery) (Hardcover)

When a teenager is knocked down in the early hours of the morning outside a nightclub, he ends up comatose in hospital and the situation starts to get complicated. Firstly, he shouldn't have been there, and when it's revealed that he had taken Ecstasy his father, a local businessman, wants all the stops pulled out to catch the supplier. The club is particularly popular among Bradfield's black community and the fact that it's situated right in the middle of the town's Muslim population, around the corner from a mosque, makes the situation more complicated still. It's seen as the perfect chance to close the place down and the businessman, the local Imam and the local newspaper all step up their campaigns to do so. This is the ninth Ackroyd and Thackeray mystery and while all of the above inter-racial and inter-generational and class-based tensions unfold against the background of a northern English town, the spotlight focuses once again on the two central characters. Michael Thackeray is a DCI and his partner, Laura Ackroyd, works for that local paper; neither of them are especially enamoured by their respective employments. There are a few unnecessary cliches here, like the perennial sweaty, beer-bellied newspaper editor and the feisty grandmother fighting the system, and Patricia Hall's portrayal of youth culture comes across as somewhat stuffy, as if she's not 100% comfortable with her subject matter. All in all, though, this is an effective enough thriller, probably best read in the context of its predecessors. For the many who have enjoyed the previous stories this will no doubt be just what they were waiting for. (Kirkus UK)

The latest case for Yorkshire DCI Michael Thackeray and his lover, Bradfield Gazette reporter Laura Ackroyd, is touched off by two very different incidents of drug-related violence. Steve Maddison is certain that his friend Derek Whitby was pushed from the roof of Priestley House, one of the crumbling flats in the section of Bradfield universally dubbed Wuthering Heights. But there's no chance that the coppers will look too closely into Derek's plunge, or even listen to Steve's insistence that Derek was no longer using heroin. Not when a much higher-profile schoolboy, self-made building supplier Grantley Adams's son Jeremy, has gotten himself high on Ecstasy at the notorious Carib Club and wandered into the path of a luckless driver that same night. Adams demands a no-holds-barred investigation into the source of the drugs, even though everybody at the Carib Club piously insists they saw nothing, the friends who went clubbing with Jeremy have mostly vanished into the woodwork, and Jeremy himself, questioned by Thackeray's men, says he can't remember a thing, has no idea where he got the E, and had certainly never used it before. Thackeray and Ackroyd (Deep Freeze, 2003, etc.) tackle the case from different angles bound to provoke still more fireworks in the troubled town and between themselves. Hall is unsparing as ever in tracing the consequences of corruption, though, as Thackeray admits at the close, "there's a lot of loose ends." (Kirkus Reviews)

After a night out clubbing, the son of a wealthy local business man is knocked down and left in a coma. His father wants to know who supplied him with ecstasy and Michael Thackery is put on the case. Meanwhile his girlfriend, Laura Ackroyd, is conducting her own investigation into the local drugs problem. The Wuthering Heights estate is controlled by the dealers and they undermine any attempts to improve life in the area. So it is no surprise when the local youth training project is targeted by vandals - but when heroin is found on site and the staff arrested, it seems as though things have started to get serious...