I was rather taken with Gallows Walk, the previous, first volume of Giles Ekins’ Inspector Yarrow series. The book showed signs of authorly inexperience, but it drew me in. There we met Inspector Christopher Yarrow of West Garside in Yorkshire, a former British pilot who lost the sight in one eye during the Battle of Britain. He’s intelligent and empathetic. In that story he hunted down and arrested a robber who had killed a payroll courier and (by vehicular accident) a little girl.

The main action of Gallows End, book two, takes a while getting going, as we begin by following the tragic aftermath of a secondary plot from the last book. But in time we join a group of golfers who discover the nude, strangled body of a young woman in the rough on the links. It takes some time to learn her identity, but she turns out to have been a young woman who was studying fashion design and working occasionally as a model. Her choices of work had not always been wise, but she was apparently liked by everyone who knew her.

The police procedural plot works itself out as Inspector Yarrow gradually sorts through a matrix of personal and professional resentments among a group of locals, until the true murderer is unmasked.

Author Ekins seems to like cliffhangers, and there’s a shocking one here. Cliffhangers are something I generally dislike, but in these cases the main mystery of the current novel is always cleared up first, so it’s all right.

The grammar and punctuation are better in this book than in the last one. Quotation marks, a problem before, have been fixed. There are also fewer confusions of tense. The text isn’t immaculate, but it’s much better.

If you like quiet, character-centered mysteries, I do recommend Gallows End. Mild cautions for disturbing situations and language.