LIMESTONE COWBOY

Stuart Pawson

Alison and Busby, £17.99 Rel: October (Hbk)

Reviewed by L. J. Hurst

Who is out nicking the knickers?

"Moonshine, washing line" as Pink Floyd once sang about the tendency. They did another called "Dogs" on the Animals album, and that's also relevant to this ninth in Stuart Pawson's Charlie Priest series, because dog fighting and the nature of the people who relish it is another of DI Priest's problems. I can't think of a Floyd song, though, that deals with food tampering, which happens to be Charlie's biggest problem.

Yet, if you stop and think about it, it is a problem that never seems to go away: as soon as some idiot has been jailed for a tampering and blackmail scam, you read in your local or national paper of someone else who has tried it on - someone who must have had just the same chance as you of reading how the police have caught all the others, and who has still tried it. Are they mad, or are they desperate? Charlie Priest finds out.

If you've read this far, you've not only had an idea of the plots in LIMESTONE COWBOY, you've also got an idea of how Charlie thinks and talks. Charlie likes to fill people in with extraneous detail. There's a scene talking about disgruntled shoplifters, but also unfairly prosecuted shoplifters, and Charlie quickly fills us in on the death of Lady Isobel Barnett - a regular on Radio 4's ANY QUESTIONS in the 1970s who dropped her electric fire into her bath when her "disgrace" became known.

On other hand, Charlie would not lead you from one subject to another through music, unlike John Rebus - Charlie is a visual artist. In his spare time he is working on his latest piece of abstract expressionism, for exhibition at the next police artist's show. However, in his current state abstract expressionism is oxymoronic, because he wants his new work to express his new found love, and Rosie Barraclough, being a geologist, might not notice anything too abstract. Ms Barraclough also has her problems to distract her - a TV company wants to exhume the body of her murderer father, and prove that he was innocent.

As a good copper Charlie is not sympathetic, but as a very good copper he is willing to reconsider. It turns out that there is not one person tampering with the food, but two, and no one is inside for the ancient murder. Charlie does not say, but more often than not, for all their efforts, the police are just cleaning up.

If that's the job, Charlie does it. On the other hand, he never recognises that that is what the TV company are doing as well. He's not perfect; fortunately, neither are the criminals. That's why he's able to catch them.