An entertaining read but, ultimately, disappointing.

Murder Mile is the fourth book in the series which follows Jane Tennison in the early years of her career. It is 1979 and she is now a detective sergeant, working from Peckham CID, a particularly tough area of South London, notorious for both petty and serious crime. Nearing the end of their nightshift, when there is a report of the body of a young woman having been found in an alley, she and her partner are the closest officers available to attend. When they arrive at the scene it appears, from a ligature around her neck, that the victim had been strangled and, from the state of her clothing, that she had possibly been sexually assaulted. A day later, and not far from the original crime scene, another woman is found murdered. Although the causes of death are very different, as are the ages and social-standing of the victims, there is the immediate question as to whether such proximity of the bodies means that the two murders could be connected. When, three days later, there is a third murder in the locality, the press put extra pressure on the investigating team, claiming that there is a serial killer at large on “Murder Mile” and that police incompetence is hampering the search for the murderer.
This is an easy to read story, one which immediately transported me back to conditions in London during the long months of the “Winter of Discontent”, when bags of stinking rubbish were piled high in streets and parks and the rats grew ever-larger and bolder with access to such easy pickings; when strikes were crippling the country, leading to the three-day week and economic pressures on families. The consequent social and political unrest provided the fertile ground which paved the way to the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister.
One of the strengths of Lynda La Plante’s story-telling is the way in which she captured so many different aspects of that era. Her intensive research into police procedural methods at the time was used to good effect, reminding the reader that investigations in the late 1970s had to be carried out without access to most of the modern technology we now take for granted; when interviews were written up by hand, with the interviewee being required to initial the end of each page; when forensic science was, to a large extent, still in its infancy and when any collation of data still relied on paper records, as well as the elephantine memory of a station officer whose sole job it was to keep records of local crimes and criminals. Interviews were unhampered by the safeguards of PACE and it was all too easy for the police to “bend the rules”. Although there were moments when it felt very disturbing and uncomfortable to be exposed to the openly racist, bigoted and misogynistic attitudes which were rife in the Metropolitan Police at that time, as well as the corruption which permeated the Force, all these reflections contributed an evocative authenticity to the story.
Jane has been promoted and, as she is proving herself to be good at her job, has now gained more, if often grudging, respect from some her colleagues. However, she is still faced with having to battle with ingrained sexist attitudes and, because of this, must work harder than any of her male colleagues in order to be listened to and taken seriously. As she reflects at one point, if she had been a man she would have been patted on the back for using her initiative, as a woman she was given a “bollocking”. The way in which the author is developing her main character is increasingly exposing the experiences which influenced and shaped the young Jane, enabling her to develop the strong, resilient personality which will make her a force to be reckoned with in the later years of her career. However, most of the other characters seem rather more one-dimensional and stereotypical, to the extent that there were times when I wondered whether the main reason for their presence in the story was to demonstrate Jane’s cleverness and tolerance!
Disappointingly, given my experiences of some of the author’s other novels, I found the plot development to be lacking in any real tension because there were far too many coincidental and far-fetched connections which undermined the credibility of the story. Also, there were moments when I felt that the author had worked just a bit too hard to include all the minutiae from her research, often in a rather tediously repetitive way, in her efforts to convey a convincing sense of time and place. For me this had the effect of taking some of the tension out of the more psychological aspects of the developing story. It is what I perceive as this imbalance which has influenced my decision to give the novel just three stars.