Very quietly, John Connor has come up through the ranks of UK police procedural writers corps, to the point where he really now should be considered among the very best practicing that difficult and particular art.
In Karen Sharpe, he has created one of the most complex and fascinating characters out there. She is damaged, moody, unpredictable and unreliable, yet brave and achingly resilient. You wouldn't want to be Mairead, her long-suffering daughter, or Pete Bains, her live-in boyfriend.
The emotional scarring in a past blighted by the consequences of anti-terrorist undercover work leaves her with too little of herself to attend to their needs. But if you were the victim of a violent crime requiring the services of an avenging angel to track down the perpetrator and serve justice, you could do no better than Karen Sharpe. She is far from being crime fiction's most sympathetic carrier, but she is never less than interesting.
In Falling, Connor's fourth novel, DC Sharpe is recovering from another terrifying ordeal some 18 months earlier and has been relegated to simple unthreatening cases by the West Yorkshire Constabulary.
But when the brutal murder of a pregnant Asian woman and the near fatal shooting of her white husband remains unresolved for a week with the latter victim unable or unwilling to cooperate with the investigation, Sharpe is called in as victim liaison in the hope that her bedside manner - soft and sympathetic - can open the case up.
Sharpe is swiftly in the midst of a nationwide man hunt with explosive racial undertones at a time when west Yorkshire and much of Lancashire is a tinder box of racial anger and frustration.
And as she is dragged ever deeper into her case, and a second vicious racist attack, Sharpe's personal life is brought into sharp focus once again, taking her fragile and frayed psyche to the very edge of oblivion.
This is an intense, uncompromising read. Stories told from multiple viewpoints, as Falling is, often feel fractured. But Connor marshalls his materials expertly, keeping a compelling story moving across many fronts towards a gripping climax.
It's high time that John Connor won the recognition and sales his great storytelling deserves. Falling is a novel with all the tools to achieve that.