Enjoyed this police procedural about a Detective Inspector who has a lot on her plate: due to an acrimonious pending divorce, only brought to an end by the death of her husband, she is living on her uncle's narrowboat on a canal outside Oxford. To make matters worse, her husband was found to be corrupt, making a fortune out of the illegal trade in animal parts, and she is under investigation by the police's own anti-corruption people even though she knew nothing about it. One of her sergeants is an unpleasant man who was best friends with her deceased husband, probably involved in some of his more minor illegal activities and has it in for her on principle. And she is then made Senior Investigation Officer of the enquiry into the death of a man in the canal which turns into a murder investigation, seemingly linked to a local crime boss.

I liked the characters and the competence of DI Greene. She is a confident, long serving officer who would quite like promotion but also wants to stay on active duty and is aware that a Chief Inspector is more desk-bound. She has a wry sense of humour. There was some nice diversity, with women and ethnic officers, and even the nasty sergeant wasn't overtly racist even if he might have such views privately. The prose style does involve a fair amount of 'head hopping' so that there is a lot of switching viewpoints, but for once I didn't mind that.

The one thing that struck me as a bit unrealistic was that her own CI starts an affair with blonde, beautiful sergeant Janine: not only would that seem to tarnish his own chances of promotion - the man above him is due to move on shortly - but Janine is ambitious and I would have thought she wouldn't want to create the impression that she is trying to progress in her career by sleeping with the boss. However, I enjoyed this opening volume enough to want to read more, so a 4 star rating. ( )

I read this as part of a group read and was not disappointed. A straightforward police procedural with a strong female protagonist, set near one of my favorite cities, Oxford. I look forward to reading more in this series. ( )

Terrific in every way: plot; characters; setting; suspense. ( )

DI Hillary Greene due to the illegal activities of her dead police officer husband Ronnie, is under investigation to determine if she had any involvement in his activities.
But when a suspicious death is reported - a body in the local canal - she is assigned this low key case. But what does it lead to.
Previously published as A Narrow Escape this is a good start for this well-written series, with its various characters. It will interesting to see how they develop over the series.
Received an Advanced Reader Copy ( )

Hillary solved the case of who murdered Pittman whose body was found in a canal lock. She also figured out why. She solved it in spite of obstacles which were thrown at her, primarily from coworkers. There was a subplot and a couple sub-subplots. But everything turned out okay.

Goodby. ( )