Requiem for a Dealer
Categories: Mystery & Suspense , Staff Picks , Fiction
I just read Jo Bannister’s sixth Brodie Farrell mystery, Requiem for a Dealer. I’ve always liked her work—her Castlemere books are great police procedurals set in northern England—but I think I like these best.
Brodie is a brisk, resourceful woman who runs a finding service in a little coastal English town. She tracks down missing pets, locates china patterns in online auctions, whatever needs finding.
In the series debut, Echoes of Lies, she was given a photograph and asked to find the man in it. She quickly and cleverly identified him as a local teacher, Daniel Hood. What she didn’t know was that she was finding him for people who then tortured him for information they believed he had, and left him for dead.
Appalled at her complicity, she couldn’t let the matter rest, wanting to help Daniel somehow resume his life even though fear of his unidentified torturers haunted his every move and police inspector Jack Deacon still haunted him mercilessly for leads.
As their friendship grows, Brodie finds that Daniel is a pretty resourceful man himself, though in a way completely opposite of her own self-confident efficiency or of Deacon’s bull-in-a-china-shop dominance. Though a meek, unassuming, nearsighted schoolteacher half crippled by fear, Daniel is an intelligent man of amazing moral stubbornness. He refuses to give in to his fear, to police intimidation, or to a desire for vengeance.
Each of the subsequent mysteries featuring Brodie, Daniel, and Deacon features the interplay of these three very different characters, and each centers around a moral issue they view very differently. In True Witness, for example, Daniel may be the only witness who can put a serial killer behind bars—but not being positive the police have the right man, he refuses to give him up to the mob or to Deacon’s open-and-shut view of justice.
In Requiem for a Dealer, a hysterical young woman nearly dashes in front of Daniel’s car as Brodie tries to coax him into learning to drive again. Daniel feels responsible for her, even though she is clearly unstable, hospitalized full of a dangerous new street drug and making wild claims that someone is trying to kill her as her horse dealer father was killed. Daniel’s quiet insistence that her story be taken seriously involves Brodie’s investigative skills and entangles them all in Deacon’s drug smuggling case.
It’s the latest volume in a series that’s both thought-provoking and genuinely suspenseful—not the run of the mill village mystery by any means.
