“My son Graham,” the old woman says over the phone. “I think he’s killed someone again.”

Henry Ward is a retired police detective in North Yorkshire. In Butcher on the Moor, the second novel in a series by Ric Brady, he’s awakened in the night by a call from a Mrs. Thomson, who says the words above. waking him up fully. He has no memory of Mrs. Thomson or of Graham, the son to whom she’s referring, but he met a lot of people in his years on the force, and gave out a lot of calling cards.

When he arrives at her house, he finds that she does indeed have an old card of his. She’s clearly mentally confused, slipping in and out of the present. But he grasps enough to know that she’s seen something that troubled her. He goes down into her cellar to investigate, and finds what looks very much like butchered human remains. Then Graham himself shows up, and Henry barely makes it out with his life, while Graham runs off into the moors, his personal stomping grounds.

Normally, this would be where Henry could drop the whole business in the hands of the working police, but they are severely understaffed and (apparently) generally incompetent. The only one he really trusts is DI Barnes, a woman detective who was badly injured in their previous adventure and is not quite healed up yet. Along with Henry and his bad hips (it’s a long wait for a replacement under National Health Service), they make less than a full-strength team. But Barnes gets approval to bring Henry on as a consultant, and he plunges into the case recklessly.

Henry’s frustration with retirement, along with the fecklessness of the working cops, combine to put him in a lot of places where angels would fear to tread. I found his disregard for his own safety when faced by younger, larger, armed opponents a little hard to swallow. But the story moved right along, the dramatic tension was high, and the characterizations and prose were good.

I wouldn’t rate Butcher on the Moor as top detective fiction, but I’ve read a lot worse.