"The Promise" by Alison Bruce (Constable, 2014)

The audio book version, read well by Jonathan Broadbent (though he pronounces "Gwydir Street" as "Gweedir Street"). It's set in Cambridge. I know all the locations (I lived in one of the streets). When a character turns left at a junction I know where they're going.

A parallelism starts the story. Gary Goodhew and Sue (they're police - Gary's having time off after injury) are haunted by the death of a colleague, Kelly. Kyle (25, father of 20-month-old Harry and husband of Hannah) is haunted by the death of Lilla. Badly injured while being a soldier, he's living in Cambridge. Hannah's put them into debt.

A vagrant is found having been violented murdered in market square, one of Gary's occasional informers. The eyes have been mutilated. Gary turns up for work because he wants to investigate the case. At first they don't even know the victim's name - he's "Ratty" to them. They find a decomposed woman's body in a lock-up that someone using Ratty's name has been renting for years. The corpse has the same mutilated eyes as Ratty had. Kyle's fingerprints are there.

Sue discovers that Gary's grandfather was murdered in his house when Gary was 11 and that Gary doesn't know. All the older generation of policeman do (a wave of them, including Gary's boss, are reaching retirement age). Gary's grandmother knows too. It was her idea to keep the nature of the death secret.

In Chapter 21 (of 58) a (new?) first-person voice appears - a man whose wife of 21 years suddenly leaves him, taking their 2 daughters. In a later chapter he moves from Cambridge to near Ely, and seems to have decided that the best way to deal with grief is impose worse grief on others. He uses words like "meander" and makes a craft demo at a market into an extended metaphor about life.

Meanwhile Kyle's hiding in Hannah's loft wondering whether to fight or flee. He tells his little sister that he found a body in a lock-up garage while attempting petty theft, and blackmailed the person who used the garage. That person had threatened Kyle's family, which is why Kyle was in hiding.

Hannah's found dead, eyes mutilated. Leah had disappeared. By now Gary knows that Addis, the police doctor, is the murderer. They find Kyle, who doesn't trust the police at first. Kyle arranges a meeting with Addis at 2am near the football stadium, the police in position. Addis is arrested Leah is saved (she's in another lock-up garage).

The final chapter's much longer than the previous dozen or so. It begins "Three days later." Addis has been writing a book about grief. There are extracts from his "research" - his plan was to study 10 families for 10 years. There's an epilogue beginning "Two weeks later". Gary recalls more about the day of his grandfather's murder. He was in the house when it happened, hiding under a bed, which he'd promised his grandfather to stay under.

Many of the characters are surprisingly self-analytical. Leah in particular is far too insightful. It's fair enough for an author to articulate a character's thoughts on their behalf, but it goes further than that.

Some passages are literary, or describe near-telepathy. Telepathy's useful when the author wants to remain invisible.

• "Her bedroom has been emulsioned in a shade of mint green. It had dried more turquoise and she preferred it that way. Streetlamps and moonlight kept it toned down to grey, but now she could pick out a film of colour and she tried to work out whether extra light was also filtering up the stairs and through her doorway" (Ch 4)
• "He held Marx's gaze until he was sure that the correct unspoken message had passed between them. It was an almost invisible softening of his boss's expression that told him it had" (Ch 10)
• "She heard a slight edge to her voice and in return a sudden stubbornness in his expression. Goodhew masked it by passing her a can of Pepsi" (Ch 37)

The phrasing seems clumsy in places -

• "She was on her own, literally" (introduction)
• "The distant thoughts were muddy in his thinking" (Ch 3)
• "For a moment she drifted back to the moment when" (Ch 37)

Were it read at a workshop I might comment that

• There are too many words. For example, the dialogue's good and doesn't need its nuances explained.
• When the author has something to say, PoV-integrity is cheaply breached.

It's a page-turner.

Other reviews

• John Cleal (this sixth story in the series makes me wonder if Alison Bruce isn’t running short on ideas for her conflicted, obsessional, but intuitive hero. ... The story works well enough as a standalone, but constant references to past incidents make it more difficult to understand either Goodhew and his idiosyncrasies or even the more straightforward Gully.)
• Jim Napier
• viewson (It is a good enough book and one that I would not have stopped reading. That said I simply didn’t find it as tense or as compelling as I would have liked this sort of police thriller to be. As I’ve said I found Gary Goodhew a good character and that would apply to Sue Gully to some degree. However most of the other characters lacked some depth for me.)
• goodreads