018 Mystery – Old
I wasn’t so sure about Kate
Brannigan- Clean Break at first, though by the end I had gotten into
it. Kate Brannigan, it seemed to me, was
very much like Candy Matson, if she had been British and had transferred to the
end of the twentieth century instead of its midpoint. Kate Brannigan is a Manchester-based private
investigator, whose weird counterpart is her lover Richard Barclay (John Lloyd
Fillingham), who seemed to be a banker?
In any case, Brannigan starts the story as the security system she
installed for a man with an old English country estate has not withstood the
predations of a gang who are stealing priceless pieces of art from such houses
up and down the country. When she talks
to the insurance man, Michal Ragoon, she discovers that his office has been
advising country estate owners to replace their real artwork with fakes—at
least three of the fakes have been stolen.
Brannigan goes to her journalist friend for help as well as Dennis, a
thief who now is a Thai boxing trainer.
When she gets the CC TV, Brannigan realizes that Dennis has actually
been the one doing the cat burglary. In
exchange for keeping him out of the line of fire, he arranges for her, in
disguise, to give a “priceless” piece of heirloom Anglo-Saxon jewelry to the
buyer, whom she promptly follows. Machinations ensue. I liked Brannigan; a fun, capable character,
second only to Kathleen Turner’s VI Warshawski.
Originally from 1998, Clean Break
was written by Val McDermid and produced by Melanie Harris. It also starred Noreen Kershaw, Joseph Jones,
Geoff Hinsliff, Rob Pickavance, Martin Reeve, and Kathryn Hunt.
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