Standing Trial, RMT406B

Justice is unreliable company in all four of these novels. LaPlante builds a child murder case on circumstantial evidence and leaves the verdict to a jury weighing grief against proof. Robinson reopens a forty-year-old suspicion through an archaeological dig that disturbs more than bones. James puts Roy Grace in a race against an obsessive whose intentions grow darker by the day. Rankin sends Rebus into Edinburgh's corporate underworld, following a pattern of deaths that nobody else will call murder. Compulsive reading.

Lynda La Plante, Trial & Retribution - Tennison has the suspect, the grief and the circumstantial case. A jury must now decide what it amounts to.

Peter Robinson, Standing in the Shadows - Banks reopens a forty-year-old accusation and finds that guilt, like the past, refuses to stay quiet.

Peter James, Want You Dead - Roy Grace is hunting a man whose obsession has already outlasted every legal attempt to contain it.

Ian Rankin, Let It Bleed - Rebus sees a pattern in deaths others dismiss as suicide and follows it into Edinburgh's corporate rot.