Close Case A Samanta Kincaid Mystery by Alafair Burke Orion tbp £10.99 hbk £12.99 July 2005 Catherine Hunt

Kincaid is the star of her Oregon DA’s office, a high flyer who has already proved that she is honest, determined and hard working. This book finds her sharing her home with her lover, Chuck, happily ordering pizza with him and ‘spooning’ (her word) with him in and out of bed. So far so good but a case involving a well-known and respected black journalist upsets Kincaid’s love life and lands her in more trouble than she had thought possible. She finds that she cannot be friends with Chuck’s buddies and, at the same time, do her job properly because they are cops, loyal, above all, to one another and she is a lawyer, loyal to the truth. There is a conflict of interests, a clash exacerbated when she is asked to work on a second case, this one involving the shooting of an unarmed woman, Delores Tompkins, an African-American mother of two by a patrol officer with the Portland Police Bureau.

There are authentic sounding scenes both in court and in the precinct and a large cast of characters portrayed, for the most part, through snappy dialogue. One character in particular is well drawn, a young journalist trying to make her mark as a crime reporter. Her investigations provide a welcome, shadow line of enquiry taking the spotlight off the police, the court and Kincaid’s frantic love life and work load.

The plot rushes along taking for granted that the reader will keep up - a tall order. Alafair Burke herself is a former deputy district attorney. Perhaps she assumes that the reader will be as well-versed in the jargon and minutiae of the law as she is or maybe it’s simply that the gap between English and the English spoken in Oregon is getting wider. At first, to be sure of understanding what is going on and remembering who is who, one finds oneself reading the same paragraph or even the same page two or three times but, gradually, the story begins to grip. It’s a complicated plot - oh for the detective in the library gently explaining who did what and why.