damieng's Full Review: Barry Maitland - The Verge Practice: A Kathy and B...
Here’s a tricky one. The wife of a world famous architect is found in their apartment with a knife jammed between her ribs. The architect, Charles Verge, can’t be found and evidence at the crime scene is almost non-existent. The obvious conclusion is that the husband has murdered his wife and then done a runner.
This is the scenario that opens The Verge Practice, the 7th book in Barry Maitland’s consistent police procedural series featuring DCI David Brock and DS Kathy Kolla. Brock and Kolla are detectives with the Serious Crimes Unit of the London Metropolitan Police working out of New Scotland Yard. Both have well-founded reputations for closing cases with an unusual combination of skill and determination.
Making this case even more tricky than usual for David Brock is the fact that it is around 4 months old and has been strenuously worked by another investigative team without success. Picking up an old case, particularly one that has been investigated so closely is not an easy thing to do and the entire team is affected by the discomfort involved with taking over.
Charles Verge is an internationally renowned architect at the height of his career, possibly with his share of enemies, but it’s difficult to imagine that someone hates him enough to murder him and his wife. This is the scenario Madeleine Verge, Charles’ mother, would have Brock believe, insisting that her son is a victim rather than a murderer.
For his part, Brock is having none of it and pursues the case as if Verge is now sunning himself on a tropical island somewhere. The discovery of a money trail that has been used to siphon money out of the Verge Practice and into a non-existent shell company before being moved out to an off-shore account reinforces his suspicions.
The investigation largely consists of careful sifting over all of the evidence and notes that were collected by the initial team in the hopes of finding something that was missed. An anomaly in the initial forensic work picked up by Kathy’s painstaking work gives Brock’s team a crucial snippet of a lead to follow. It’s this piece of missed evidence that gives the team the first hint that all was not well within the corporate walls of the Verge Practice, Jealousy, affairs, hatred and fear are all lurking within and any one of these emotions could be excuse enough for murder. But there’s so much more at stake and Brock is being pressured by his superiors to bring the case to a satisfactory conclusion.
From a very low-key beginning, this is a police procedural that grows into lively story that stretches the action from England to Spain and back again. And then it packs a few surprise punches that I just didn’t see coming.
There is a comfortable, linear feel to the story as it moves forward in a neat logical progression. One small lead is followed by the resulting discovery and the case quickly begins to mount. It’s the kind of structure that allows the reader to easily become engaged in the mystery and then make their own guesses as to what is going to happen.
Just as important as the progression of the investigation is the personal development of the principal characters and this is done to good effect here with the personal background of Kolla and Brock carried on from earlier books in the series. While a lot of the detail about these characters will be more meaningful to those who have read the entire series, the book would still read quite well as a stand alone.
Maitland sets up a series of possible red-herring scenarios for the reader to choose from as the investigation seemingly winds up at one point, only to explode into a multitude of unexpected directions. Throughout all of this there is a definite adversarial tone to the book, with Brock having to weather pressure both from his boss at Scotland Yard and from Charles Verge’s mother. It seems that everyone would like Brock to forget about Charles Verge, whether he was a murderer or a victim.
The Verge Practice is a strongly plotted mystery that continues on a very enjoyable police procedural series. Apart from a slightly distracting side story that has Kathy chairing a Crime Strategy Working Party committee dealing with minority and gender issues, this is a completely absorbing mystery that is thoroughly enjoyable reading.
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