I’ll say at the outset that I do not love the Roper-Hooley detective series, set in London. I don’t hate the books; I just have no problem putting them down. But I bought a set of four (got them for free, actually), they are readable, and times are tough, so I’m reading them.

In The Case of the Dirty Bomb, brilliant autistic detective Jonathan Roper is back at headquarters, having completed his time with a national security agency. But his partner Brian Hooley is concerned about him. He seems to have lost his way; he’s having trouble analyzing information and is worried he’s “losing it.”

With Hooley’s help, he changes his approach and soon realizes the reason he’s been having trouble. They’re facing an unprecedented problem. Someone is gathering fissionable nuclear material cached in secret locations across Europe and smuggling it into England to set up the extortion scheme to end all extortion schemes.

There’s nothing all that wrong with these books; they simply don’t ring my bells very loudly. The autistic character, Jonathan Roper, is really the most interesting one here. I guess that’s not surprising; he is the “exotic.” But the others could have been made more colorful, in my view. I didn’t find myself caring about them a lot.

Toward the end, the author takes an opportunity to make a dig at anti-Communists, but the political side wasn’t really intrusive. One Russian character’s name was inconsistently spelled. The book was okay, though, though I thought the plot a little far-fetched. Maybe you’ll like it better than I did.