Clean Cut: An Anna Travis Mystery

Love Lynda La Plante and The Anna Travis Mysteries. Could not put down. A real page turner.

This was a great read, I couldn't put it down. Anna Travis is a great heroine

I tried to reduce the stars to four but found that the system will not let me. I found this to be the most intriguing and well-written of Lynda LaPlante's Anna Travis police procedurals. I will not get into the plot except to say that her reaction to her lover's possible involvement in the murder of an admittedly evil suspect is chilling and realistic. To love someone, nearly lose him, then "lose" him again in a particularly creepy way is disturbing in the extreme. Anna's crawling skin is palpable. Much has been written here about the bigotry expressed by some of the characters toward immigrants, particularly those of color. It is true that language is brutal, endless and in some respects vicious. It also is generalized from murderous drug dealers, slavers, child predators and other menacing types to all of the many immigrants flooding into England and allegedly consuming its limited resources. Furthermore, the murders themselves are so disgusting as to cast further aspersions on the humanity of these criminals. Surely they are not as good as us. How COULD they be? Fair to say that we read of such atrocity in such places as Darfur and Congo, from whence these guys came. But it is also fair to say that there are far more victims in those nations than there are murderers, something LaPlante and her surly cops might keep in mind, along with the level of brutality demonstrated by the colonial British when the opportunity arose. The author can be faulted for failing to slip a more reasoned voice into the mix. Instead, fellow cops are all but silent, if annoyed, in the face of bigotry that curdles the milk and must at times compromise their police work and possibly put their own lives, and those of their peers, in danger. Immigrants to this nation naturally include artists, teachers, physicians, economists, biologists, chemists, otherr scientists, social workers, carpenters, mechanics and other fully employed contributors to the life and fortune of Gret Britain. The voices of a few enraged cops, however, speak most loudly here and if xenophobia were a cologne, it would certainly stink up the place. I also wondered how James Langton popped up from nearly prone and nearly dead to walking (albeit painfully) within a few days. Not bloody likely, I think. His physical and psychological misery is well represented, however, so I guess we must forgive LaPlant for not taking us through the long, long, long and tedious recovery that such his maiming would certainly entail. Overall, I thought she prepresented the points of view well, here, with the exception of the absence of even a white British citizen telling their screaming, self-righteous cracker compatriots to shut the hell up. It made me wonder if the author was illustrating the actual hostility of the civil servants or puttng her own cod philosophy and cod science into the mouths of her characters.

Lynda La Plante is well known to mystery/suspense readers. Her BBC television series, PRIME SUSPECT, ran for seven seasons and starred award-winning actress Helen Mirren as DCI Jane Tennison. In addition to being an actress herself and writing movie and television scripts, La Plante has written several stand-alone and series novels. The author's latest book, CLEAN CUT, is the third in her Anna Travis series. RED DAHLIA and ABOVE SUSPICION. I hadn't read either of the previous books, but I had no problem diving into this one regarding backstory. La Plante delivers well-developed characters with a tremendous amount of internal conflict. What I needed to know about the two primary characters, Anna and her lover Detective Chief Inspector Jimmy Langdon, was quickly supplied, and I was immersed into the new problems that faced them as a couple and as police officers. After a rather slow-paced launch at the start of the book, though deep in character complications, Anna starts questioning her relationship with Langdon. She's gotten irritated at the way she seems to have turned from lover to caretaker for him, all without appreciation. Then she gets the phone call that turns her life inside out: Langdon was attacked at his latest crime scene. She's told that even if he lives, Langdon will probably never walk again. The book centers at the outset on the test of the two wills of Anna and Langdon. She wants to help, but he's so cynical and bitter that she can barely stand to be around him. Not only that, but she finds out that Langdon is going behind her back to get information about the man that attacked him. Anna fears that Langdon is engaging in a vendetta that will land him in trouble with the law. If the wheelchair doesn't get Jimmy Langdon, it looks like prison will. I liked the characters a lot because they have obvious history and "feel" real. I hated the way Langdon treats Anna, but I totally understood where Langdon's mind is while in the hospital. People in situations like Langdon's strike out at those that love them because those people are the only ones willing to put up with them. This bitterness spreads throughout the novel as Anna's own murder case suddenly intersects with the investigation Langdon was pursuing when he was nearly killed. La Plante uses the novel to point out how vulnerable countries are these days. Transient populations drift through major cities, like London in this novel, and bring a lot of danger and crime because that's a big part of what those people have to rely on for employment. The presentation of La Plante's views may be unsettling for some, but there's now denying the existence of the problem. The book remains steady throughout, and its solid police work that breaks the cases wide open and connects them. There are no car chases, martial arts battles, or shootouts. The action La Plante relays in her pages is propelled by emotion and the reader's driving curiosity to find out what's going