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When a woman is found dead in her London home, suspicion naturally falls on her husband and it looks like the case will be wrapped up easily, but the man refuses to confess and puts forward an alternative scenario that seems unlikely in the extreme. But when their prime suspect commits suicide on the way to prison by flinging himself under a speeding van, Inspector John Carlyle's curiosity is piqued and he begins to dig a little deeper. Carlyle also needs to take time out from his official investigation when a couple of quite diverse acquaintances call in favours he owes them. He's asked to find a young boy who's been kidnapped by a father who apparently thinks nothing of handing his son over to a child trafficking ring, and to help a television reporter who believes she's being stalked. NEVER APOLOGISE, NEVER EXPLAIN weaves several quite diverse strands together into a reasonably-paced narrative that pulls off the difficult trick of slotting in the narrative of past events in the 1973 fascist coup in Chile without breaking up the flow of what is happening in the present. I have a low tolerance threshold for flashbacks as a whole, but here they were employed in a way that kept my attention rather than causing me to simply hurry through them at speed to get back to the main story. As a main character, Carlyle follows the usual trend of having any number of flaws and quirks, but generally contrives to be engaging rather than irritating, although I wasn't sure whether a police officer who can't drive is entirely plausible, even in central London. One thing that did irritate, though, was the frequent use of the initials WPC to describe female police officers. I make no apologies for mentioning this yet again in a review as the term has been obsolete for well over 20 years and should certainly not still be in use. The book's strong point lies in a host well-drawn minor characters and in Carlyle himself, who manages to get the job done, although not always whilst remaining on the right side of the line. § Linda Wilson is a writer, and retired solicitor, with an interest in archaeology and cave art, who now divides her time between England and France.
Reviewed by Linda Wilson, April 2012
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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