Jane takes on the Church

I do love a police procedural, and a British one puts icing on the cake! Jane Tennison is a great character - and one thing I love about her is how real she is. She makes mistakes. She has biases. Sometimes she lets her emotions get the best of her, esp. when it comes to her role as one of the few women in British policing. I also love the way La Plante uses British location names and slang - it really makes you feel like you are in London! One also gets the real sense how thin the line Jane and her colleagues walk really is...

This time, Jane comes up against the Catholic church, when a coffin is found at a construction site. Jane and her colleagues open the coffin to find a mummified nun; after the autopsy, it becomes clear that the nun did not die naturally, and off we go, using minimal clues to discover how she met her end. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your point of view, Jane's boss' boss has an ax to grind with a former priest, now Archbishop, that makes Jane's job a more difficult. While sometimes the dialogue feels a bit stilted, and the writing feels a bit like a screenplay, the story is compelling and I found it hard to put down. Great story, with some commentary thrown in for good measure.

P. S. Thanks to #BookishFirst/#Netgalley for the advance copy.