Eric Wright. The Last Hand (2001) Charlie Salter is approaching retirement, and has been assigned office duties. An apparently simple murder case turns out not to be. Salter gets the case because one of the people close to the victim wants him to do it. He’s assigned Terry Smith, a brand new constable, an immigrant from Glasgow, to work with him. After a lot of palaver and fact checking, we find out what we probably inferred around the quarter mark: it was a passion-driven murder. A very large pile of misleading information and surmise has to be cleared away, mostly because a lot of it, if true, would implicate a lot of important legal people in corruption and scandal.
A good read, but not a great one. Salter goes off into the sunset of retirement happy that he’s played one last hand. A poker game figures in the solution by providing the clue that unravels the knot.
OK, that’s enough cliches. I enjoyed the book because I like the Salter series. The book could have stood a lot more story about Salter and Smith. **½
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