Detective Inspector Frank Shapiro and his two trusted and loyal chief investigators, Liz Graham and Cal Donovan, have their hands full when two seemingly unrelated murders happen in quick succession in their town of Castlemere, England.

First, the body of a young woman, a prostitute, is discovered in the hold of a family’s touring boat. Shapiro quickly traces the woman’s last activities to the Hotel Barbican, where a convention of international industrialists concluded the night of her murder. That night the conventioneers were in high spirits after a successful event, and drunken revels filled the hotel.

The hotel’s convention planner, Philip Kendall, can shed little light on which if any of his constituents may have hired, brutally beaten and then killed the prostitute by throwing her of the hotel’s roof. Kendall had been miles away having a late supper with his good friend Grace Atwood. But Kendall is forced to think a bit harder about who may be involved in the murder when the police determine that the sex and beating of the prostitute occurred in Atwood’s room while she and Kendall were at dinner.

Things start to get real hairy after the body of a derelict is found. He was killed by a sniper’s bullet fired some half-mile away. Are the two murders connected? The investigators can barely ponder the possibility before they learn that Kendall narrowly escaped a sniper shot clearly intended for him. When Shapiro and Donovan go to Kendall’s house to provide protection, Shapiro is gunned down in a second attempt on Kendall’s life.

As Shapiro lies unconscious in the hospital, Graham and Donovan reason that whoever killed the prostitute hired a contract killer to eliminate Kendall, and the derelict was used as target practice. They then receive a desperate call from another prostitute, Maddie Cotterick, who says she witnessed the murder and knows why someone is trying to kill Kendall. She fears for her life, since she astutely understands that she too must be silenced.

She is in hiding in another town, so Graham dispatches Donovan to bring her back to Castlemere for questioning. But it is not until Donovan is driving Maddie back that he realizes that Shapiro and not Kendall was and is the intended target of the contract killer, who is bound and determined to fulfill his contract to eliminate Shapiro and Maddie. This sets the investigation into a tailspin, and everyone involved must carefully weigh every action taken and every word spoken And Donovan must use all his wits to protect Maddie from a threat he cannot identify, locate or predict when or where it will next appear.

The Hireling’s Tale is a good, inventive suspense thriller that, once it gets going - about one-third in -is an edge-of-your-seat action-filled ride.

The three main characters, Shapiro, Graham and Donovan, along with Detective Superintendent Hilton, who is rushed in to take over the investigation when Shapiro is shot and with whom Donovan has some bad history, are intelligent and have interesting background and complex relationships.

My only complaints with this novel is that for such a smartly written story, I was often a step ahead of Graham and Donovan, as I think most readers will be. For instance, it takes the Castlemere police a lot longer to suppose that Shapiro was all along the contract killer’s target than I suspect it will take most readers.

In addition, there isn’t much dialogue in the book, but when characters do talk, they tend to speak in self-righteous speeches that can go on for a bit. All the speechifying can get in the way when you want to get back to the fast-changing action, but at least the harangues are cogent and crisply written.

The writer seems to assume the reader is familiar with her characters; she is leisurely about giving job titles and indicating inter-relationships, so I wondered if this book is the latest is a series set in Castlemere. The cover doesn’t say one way or the other, but a quick Internet search found at least three other titles in the series.

Overall, this is an exciting, enjoyable read. I wouldn’t mind reading more of these members of the Castlemere police force.

--Lillian Jackson