Continuing my reading of John Dean’s Inspector Jack Harris series. I don’t love these books, but I guess they’re growing on me. I enjoyed To Honour the Dead.

Jack Harris is a detective in the English Pennine town of Levbridge. He is misanthropic and grumpy, but an effective cop, though a little rough in his methods. (I’m always interested when fictional British cops show aggressive and corner-cutting tendencies. Is the popularity of such stories an indication of public discontent with current real-world policing?)

Remembrance Sunday, the day for honoring the war dead, is approaching, and there’s tension in Levbridge and its neighboring communities. Most of the locals respect those who served, but there are a couple war protestors who promise to disrupt ceremonies. Also somebody has been defacing monuments. Jack Harris finds plenty of people to annoy him in these squabbles – not only the protestors but a local businessman who idolizes his father, who was decorated for service in the Falklands, and seems intent on getting the man’s name on every memorial. Jack is also irritated by a local woman whose son’s recent death was attributed by the coroner to alcohol and freezing weather, but she insists he was murdered, and won’t quit nagging the police about it.

But when a genuine hero – a Victoria Cross winner from World War II, is murdered in his home, Harris and his team soon discover plots and schemes and secrets a-plenty.

Good writing. Interesting (if sometimes annoying) characters. Author Dean is good at misdirection through lies and counterintuitive characterization. Cautions for language, but To Honour the Dead was good entertainment.