Good Friday

Good Friday is the third book in the author's Jane Tenneson Thriller series. I have never read anything by Linda LaPlante before and did not know what to expect. The book was selected as my choice for the Calendar of Crime Challenge for April. It was published in 2018.

The publisher's summary:

In the race to stop a deadly attack just pray she's not too late . . . March, 1976. The height of The Troubles. An IRA bombing campaign strikes terror across Britain. Nowhere and no one is safe. When detective constable Jane Tennison survives a deadly explosion at Covent Garden tube station, she finds herself in the middle of a media storm. Minutes before the blast, she caught sight of the bomber. Too traumatised to identify him, she is nevertheless a key witness and put under 24-hour police protection. As work continues round the clock to unmask the terrorists, the Metropolitan police are determined nothing will disrupt their annual Good Friday dinner dance. Amid tight security, hundreds of detectives and their wives and girlfriends will be at St Ermin's Hotel in central London. Jane, too, is persuaded to attend. But in the week leading up to Good Friday, Jane experiences a sudden flashback. She realises that not only can she identify the bomber, but that the IRA Active Service Unit is very close to her indeed. She is in real and present danger. In a nail-biting race against time, Jane must convince her senior officers that her instincts are right before London is engulfed in another bloodbath.

The story was well plotted and had a comfortable pace; Not too fast and not too slow.  It's a police procedural set in 1976 and is based on the IRA bombings in London. I was quite surprised that Jane's character was continually making mistakes during the investigation and was always being criticized by her male counterparts. I expected Jane to be a perfect investigator who was well respected by her peers. I cringed every time she said that she learned an investigative technique from her policing education. She really seemed like a beginner. Jane was a beginner, though. Her job in the novel was her first as a detective. I think that I missed alot concerning her character by not reading the first two books in the series. 

If you are interested in reading this book, I recommend that you start at the beginning and read all of the books in order of publication. It was hard to tell who Jane was as a character because she seemed to be a fish out of water in Good Friday. Still, the investigation was interesting and I enjoyed the setting of a British police station.

3 out of 5 stars.