Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: A Limited Justice by Catriona King

Catriona King is a medical doctor, originally from Belfast in Northern Ireland. She relocated to London to work as a physician and trained as a medical forensics expert there, assisting the Metropolitan Police with their cases. She returned to Belfast where she now lives and writes the DCI Craig police procedural series. The first book about Craig was published in 2012 by Crooked CAT Publishing. The second edition was released in 2016 on Amazon’s independent publishing platform CreateSpace. The 25^th book in the series was issued recently in June 2021. The books are based in Northern Ireland but often involve other parts of the UK and Europe.

A Limited Justice introduces Detective Chief Inspector Marc Craig of the Belfast Docklands Coordinated Crime Unit and his team of homicide investigators, as well as Craig’s lifelong friend Dr. John Winters, the lead medical examiner. The team is tackling a bizarre homicide at a gasoline station, where the victim was drenched with fuel but seems to have died from a blow to his head. The instrument used to administer that blow is hard to identify and some of the trace evidence is unusual. When some of the same elements show up at an apparent mugging and drowning in Limavady, 60 miles northwest of Belfast, Craig’s team realizes the two investigations will lead to the same person, despite the differences in murder methods.

An excellent contemporary procedural that emphasizes forensics, as might be expected considering the author’s professional credentials. A thread about the killer runs in parallel to the investigation. Normally I don’t like to know what the culprit is thinking, it so seldom is edifying, but this murderer is not ordinary. At all. I consider the freshness of the plot to be a high point of the story.

The single false note is the treatment of Detective Inspector Julia McNulty, lead for the Limavady homicide team. She is presented as difficult, egotistic, and defensive, disliked by her coworkers. Nonetheless she melts as soon as Craig looks at her. Really stereotypical and offensive treatment of a woman in a managerial role. A solid editor would have corrected this glaring fault in the story before it saw print. However, the story line is so original that I can recommend this debut of a long-running and potentially binge-worthy series, especially to fans of police procedurals.

·         Publisher: ‎ CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 2nd edition (May 31, 2016)

·         Language: ‎ English

·         Paperback: ‎ 286 pages

·         ISBN-10: ‎ 1533494509

·         ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1533494504

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2021

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.