Book Review: A Killing of Innocents by Deborah Crombie

In Deborah Crombie's A Killing of Innocents, Scotland Yard detectives Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James race to solve the shocking murder of a young woman before panic spreads across London. Check out Janet Webb's review!

Enthusiastic readers of Deborah Crombie’s Kincaid/James police procedural series often have to wait a long time between books, but those readers are mollified by the excellence of the stories. The most recent book, A Bitter Feast, was a banquet for fans, with its Cotswold setting and closed country house plot. Following tradition, the new mystery is set in London.  

How often is a detective superintendent in the same spot as a victim moments before their death? Kincaid and his sergeant, Doug Cullen, have plans to meet up in a Victorian pub in Lamb’s Conduit Street for a quick debrief on the knifing case of an elderly Asian shop owner. It’s Friday happy-hour and Kincaid nurtures a beer before his running-late sergeant arrives. He checks the time:

The young woman sitting alone at the next table seemed to mimic him, checking her own watch, then her mobile, with a frown of irritation. In spite of the blustery November evening, the room was warm from the fire and she had shrugged off her fur-trimmed anorak to reveal hospital scrubs. Their pale green color set off her dark skin and the dark twists of her hair.

Doug Cullen arrives, mentioning it’s been a bugger of a day as he cleans his rain-spattered glasses. While Kincaid fetches a Bloomsbury IPA for Doug, he notices the girl getting ready to leave.

The call came as Kincaid and Doug were putting on their coats, preparing to brave the windy damp for the short walk back to Holborn Station. Kincaid’s heart sank when he saw the name on the screen—Simon Gikas, his team’s efficient case manager. Hopefully, it was just paperwork. He’d promised Gemma he’d make the tail end of Toby’s ballet rehearsal.

It’s a knifing in Russell Square, not too far away. Simon sends a car and Kincaid tells Doug it looks like they’ve got themselves a murder. They check in with the PCs and the medics before approaching the body. A medic tells them the victim is wearing scrubs, and Kincaid feels a prickle of unease:

“Oh, Christ,” he muttered, stepping back and nearly treading on Doug’s toes.

 

“What is it?” Doug moved closer and Kincaid heard the sharp exhalation of his breath. “Shit. Isn’t that the girl from the pub?”

 

“I’m afraid so.”

Her name is Sasha Johnson: She’s a trainee doctor. When Kincaid is told she’s been stabbed, he thinks of Gemma. Coincidentally Gemma has recently been assigned to a task force on knife crimes which are on the rise. A reoccurring pattern in A Killing of Innocents is the meshing of Kincaid and Gemma’s professional and personal lives. While Kincaid and Doug hover over Sasha’s dead body, Gemma is plastered up against the wall of a rehearsal-room, suffering from “pins and needles,” waiting to watch their son Toby in The Nutcracker.

And just where the hell, she wondered, was Duncan?

 

He’d promised he’d be there to see Toby’s first appearance in the mouse head. Toby was also dancing in the opening party scene, but for him that paled in comparison to the thrill of wearing the mouse costume and wielding a plastic sword.

While Gemma waits, she thinks about work.

Her new job tracking and identifying knife crime in Greater London had at first sounded glamorous but had turned out to mean mind-numbingly dull days spent at a computer terminal at the new Met headquarters, poring over reports.

 

Gemma missed the CID team at Brixton, as well as boots-on-the-ground investigating.

Finally she gets a text from Duncan, telling her he’s got something for her, and to meet him in Russell Square. Sasha’s death is in Gemma’s bailiwick and given her relationship to Kincaid, it’s a natural that she and her former partner, detective sergeant Melody Talbot, would be asked to muck in and lend a hand. A busy working mother, Gemma is stretched to the max, constantly juggling childcare responsibilities and her job. She gets some advice from her young daughter’s trustee—advice that makes her uncomfortable . Louise doesn’t pull any punches.

“Gemma.” Louise’s voice held a command. “Listen to me. You’ve spent the last year running yourself ragged, cobbling together childcare by depending on Kit and on the kindness of friends. You’ve given up a CID job that you love. It’s time you faced the facts. It’s not working.”

Louise cuts to the chase, telling Gemma she needs a nanny. 

It turns out that Sasha Johnson, a very private person, is part of a family in Kincaid and Gemma’s extended friend group—that fact is as uncomfortable for the police as it is for the family, especially when the coroner reveals that Sasha was pregnant. No one knew she was even in a relationship. 

A Killing of Innocents has an unusual narrative. An estranged couple quarrel over the wife’s decision to go abroad, leaving a young daughter behind in the custody of the husband. It’s unclear how this plot interfaces with the primary story. Another strand is Gemma’s worries about her complicated home-front and the divergent needs of their children (much of which devolves upon her) amidst her delight, almost like a withered plant soaking up water, to be on the street working a case again. Then the knifing of the trainee doctor is followed by a second knifing, which brings unwelcome pressure from the higher-ups to solve the case quickly.

Crombie excels at weaving together a cohesive story out of disparate circumstances and characters. The thread that ties the book together is the visceral horror that deliberate violence can be and is visited on innocents. A Killing of Innocents is rooted in the relationship between Duncan and Emma; how their careers impact their family life and friendships. It’s absorbing, nuanced, and true to the personalities of two people we’ve come to regard as almost family.

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