Those Who Feel Nothing: The Fifth Brighton Mystery

Guttridge’s fifth Brighton mystery (after 2013’s The Devil’s Moon) combines a straightforward police procedural, told in third-person omniscient voice, with a nebulous second-person narrative, about a vengeance-obsessed man tracking down the mercenaries who killed his wife in Cambodia decades ago. When a prominent member of the Brighton community—the director of the Royal Pavilion—gets caught in a scandal involving the unearthing of long-dead female corpses, the police, headed by the formerly disgraced but newly elected Police and Crime Commissioner Bob Watts, discover a cache of invaluable relics looted from Cambodia’s Angkor Wat hidden in the tunnels beneath the Pavilion. As Watts and crew investigate further, the connection between the two seemingly unrelated story lines becomes evident. The taut, richly detailed plot will carry readers along until the rushed and disconnected conclusion. (Sept.)