I feel cheated. I was tricked into reading Kill Chase, a book I wouldn’t have read if I’d known more about its author, and what’s worse, I liked it.

Two fishermen on the River Avon, near Bristol, England, hook a nasty catch – a severed human arm wrapped in a plastic bag. They call the police, who drag the river and find more body parts – from two different corpses.

Assigned to the case is Detective Inspector Ryan Chase, who’s having a hard time of it these days. He’s still mourning the death of his daughter, and his divorce from his wife. He works to distract his mind, and has developed symptoms of OCD.

He and his team have little to go on – how do you identify who dumped body parts in a river? Their investigations will lead them into the world of the homeless, and the good samaritans who serve them – but victims and victimizers can be hard to distinguish from one another.

Kill Chase was one of the more compelling books I’ve read in a while. The emphasis was on character, and I cared about Ryan Chase’s life and that of his partner, a young woman caring for her mentally disabled brother. I cared about the other characters too.

At the end, when I saw the author’s bio, I realized the reason for this emotion-intensive approach (Warning: sexism follows). The author, M. K. Farrar, is a woman. I should have guessed. Nowadays, authors who use initials instead of first names are usually female. Most of the time I watch out for that.

The author’s sex probably also explains the abundance of female police in this book. The Bristol force appears to be about 60 percent women, and all the important cops (except for Ryan himself) are female.

But I can’t deny that the author did a pretty good job of portraying her male hero. Fair play to her, as they say in Ireland.

Kill Chase is an impressive police procedural, Recommended.