H.R.F. Keating: The Good Detective (USA 1995)

From the Publisher:
HRF Keating, twice the recipient of Britain's Gold Dagger and two-time Edgar winner, follows his enthusiastically greeted The Rich Detective with this absorbing tale of felonious intent and foul play.

When a case from years ago returns to haunt him, Chief Constable Ned French realizes it could cost him his career-perhaps even his life.

Heather Jones, forced into a false murder confession after a harrowing late-night interview with French and a colleague, has now served fifteen years of her twenty-year sentence. In all that time she has never appealed her conviction.

But the situation has changed. Someone else has confessed to the crime, and a crusading attorney named Deborah Brooks is determined to get at the truth, even if it proves to be Ned French's ruin. While Ned fears Deborah, he is also strongly attracted to her.

Fighting for his reputation and his career, French gets a tip that could lead to the biggest coup of his working life: He is reliably informed that the Corrigan cousins are masterminding a huge shipment of cocaine into Britain - and he learns where it's going to land. Will French be able to pull off the arrest, or will events from his past overwhelm him before he has a chance?

And is he, or is he not, a good detective?

H. R. F. Keating, one of the pre-eminent crime writers of our day, asks some disturbing questions and finds some troubling answers in a riveting novel that will be long remembered.

H.R.F. Keating: The Good Detective. A Mystery. Scribner's, ISBN: 0684815222 (December, 1995), 199 p., $21.00.