Death Wore White

Starred review from April 6, 2009
Twists pile on twists in Kelly’s superb whodunit, the possible first in a series. Soon after Det. Insp. Peter Shaw and Det. Sgt. George Valentine, who had been the partner of Shaw’s disgraced policeman father, stumble on a corpse on an inflatable raft on a Norfolk beach, the pair are stuck in a blizzard, their car one of many vehicles blocked by a fallen tree. During this mishap, someone kills Harvey Ellis, the driver nearest the obstruction, with a chisel blow to the eye and manages to escape without leaving traces in the snow. Other bodies surface after the police extricate themselves from the scene of Ellis’s murder. While Shaw and his team try to untangle the lies told them by every witness they encounter, he also tries to redeem his late father’s reputation by reopening the child murder case that brought his father down. Kelly (The Skeleton Man
), winner of the CWA Dagger in the Library Award, maintains the suspense throughout.