Thurstan Baddeley is a police inspector… somewhere in the northwest of England. I’m not sure the city is actually named in Dan Wheatcroft’s The Box, a somewhat oddball novel that I found delightful. He leads the Major Crimes squad, works well with his team, and is good at solving crimes. Unfortunately, his Chief Constable has it in for him. He keeps nagging Baddeley to institute department policies, like wearing preferred pronoun badges and rainbow badge lanyards. Finally, it comes to a head and Thurstan is packed off to a new posting, to investigate cold crimes in the small town of St Helens, Sutton Box station, where police careers go to die.

Soon he is joined by his friend and subordinate Randolph (known as Gandolph), a computer hacker who has massaged assignment records to excuse his presence. Together they begin going through the boxes of cold crimes files. Most of the old cases are uninteresting, but two of them draw their attention. One concerns the murder of a prostitute in 1902, which went unsolved though there was an obvious suspect – the son of the richest man in town. The other comes from the 1970s, and concerns a socially awkward young man, who’d never been in trouble before, convicted of stabbing a man to death. He later committed suicide in prison. Most of the people involved in both cases are dead, but there are people who still know things, and others who remember, with either sadness or fear.

There are no gunfights in The Box (well, this is England, after all), no fistfights or chases. All the violence happens off stage. Yet the author succeeds in escalating the dramatic tension steadily, and I turned the pages with eagerness.

It turns out that The Box is the beginning of a new series for the author, but it branches off from an earlier series. I’ll have to check those other books out. The writing wasn’t absolutely top-shelf – the author sometimes falls into confusing constructions like “fate inhabited him instantly.” But it was good enough to carry a fascinating story with lively characters.

And the cherry on top, of course, is the politically incorrect elements. You don’t run across such bare-faced un-wokeness in many novels today – no wonder the author uses a pseudonym.

The Box is highly recommended.