Loose Tongues

August 13, 2018
In this promising series launch, British author Simms (the John Spicer series) introduces 22-year-old Sean Blake on his first day as a detective constable with the Manchester police. Sean suspects, as do some of his fellow officers, that he got the promotion thanks to the influence of his mother, Janet, a former police officer. Now confined to a wheelchair, Janet has poured all her ambition into gaining advancement for her son. He has been assigned to a special team handling a series of murders in which the victims’ cellphones were shoved in their mouths after death. Unclear is what unites the victims, who are of different ages, professions, and appearance. While his colleagues hit the streets, Sean is tasked with going through phone records and watching CCTV tapes. Janet and the other members of the squad both help and hinder his duties. A hero of a police procedural who does the unglamorous grunt work is a refreshing change, though Sean does get to indulge in some dynamic action in the exciting finale. Readers will look forward to seeing how his career progresses.

August 1, 2018
Simms (A Price to Pay, 2014, etc.) kicks off a new series about a Manchester detective who, after benefiting from early promotion, can't catch a break.Ever been so annoyed by someone nattering away on a neighboring seat aboard public transit that you wanted to kill them? Well, an electrician fired from his vocational teaching post for slapping a student has taken the idea one step further. He tracks women whose cellphone whining annoys him to their homes, poses as a deliveryman to gain access, smothers them, cuts out their tongues, and shoves their precious phones between their dead jaws. DC Sean Blake, who's just joined the Serious Crimes Unit of the Greater Manchester Police, wishes he could be part of the hunt for the killer of four women--a fifth corpse has yet to be discovered--but he's been sidelined after being unjustly accused of cowardly inaction in the unsuccessful attempt to bring in Ian Cahill, the unit's primary suspect. What makes Sean's enforced pencil-pushing even worse is his realization that his posting to Serious Crimes at 22 was due not to his brilliance or hard work but to a favor his mother, former police sergeant Janet Blake, called in from her old mate ACC Tony Shipton, who's owed her ever since her heroic pursuit of a runaway criminal condemned her to a wheelchair and her own paper-pushing job gathering information for transport surveys. Sean would like nothing better than to identify the killer on his own, but his most promising ideas all seem to come from his mother.A routine setup distinguished by Simms' decision to strip away all the extra bits, his skill at ratcheting up the tension, his insights into tracking criminals in a culture in which public surveillance is the norm, and his predictable but inspired choice of the killer's climactic target.

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September 15, 2018
Simms leaves behind his Iona Khan (A Price to Pay, 2014) and Jon Spicer (Cut Adrift, 2010) series to introduce Sean Blake. Blake is just starting his new role as detective constable in Manchester's Serious Crimes Unit when a serial killer begins terrorizing the town. Someone is murdering women and removing their tongues?to make room for the cell phones the killer leaves in the corpses' mouths. Blake gets off on the wrong foot with his squad when he fails to follow an armed suspect early in the investigation. Retired from the force after a shooting left her with limited mobility, Blake's mom pulled some strings to get her inexperienced son assigned to a prime spot, which further hurts his credibility. This series debut follows the familiar convention of alternating chapters between the killer's point of view (first-person) and that of the investigators (third-person). Followers of British procedurals will welcome this appealing new protagonist to the genre.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)