This is the fifth in a series set in Yorkshire, England and featuring Detective Chief Inspector Harry Grimm, 40. Harry has a fearsome countenance. His face was “crafted from wounds he’d sustained from an IED when he was in the Parachute Regiment, and then honed over the years into something just short of being hard and horrible enough to make a grown man shit himself.”

Twenty years ago, Harry found his mother dead and 10-year-old brother Ben devastated and unable to recover from it. Ben became dependent on drugs and was now in Bristol Prison. Harry has been looking for their abusive, murderous father ever since, and it is an obsession for him. It is also destroying him, in the words of his boss, Bristol Detective Superintendent Alice Firbank, who sends him to Yorkshire for “secondment.” She wants him to “do a bit of reevaluation, that kind of thing.”

Thus, Harry has now been working in “Herriot country.” (The dales are familiar to many as the setting for the television series, “All Creatures Great and Small,” which was based on the books by the Yorkshire vet, James Herriot. It had been filmed around Wensleydale and over in nearby Swaledale, and this is where Harry now headed a team he has gotten to like very well indeed.). Moreover, Ben has been released from prison and is now living with Harry.

Harry works with the surprisingly competent and affable PCSO (Police Community Support Officer) Jim Metcalfe, PCSO Liz Coates, Detective Sergeant Matt Dinsdale, and Detective Constable Jenny Blades.

In this installment, the team is called to the home of retired Army Colonel James Fletcher. On the night he and his wife Helen were celebrating his seventy-fifth birthday, they were in a car accident, and his wife died. James was devastated, and his daughters - Ruth, who lived just next door, and Pat, along with her husband Dan, were staying with him for a while.

James called the police because he kept seeing an intruder - one he was convinced was in fact the ghost of his wife. He even had a medium come out to see if she could make contact with his wife. The team didn’t subscribe to supernatural events, but what happened next certainly appeared strange. And then more deaths occurred. . . . .

Evaluation: The mystery is satisfyingly complex, and it is rewarding to get to know Harry and his team better. ( )