A police procedural set in Cambridgeshire England, with DI Manon Bradshaw. The character still grates on me because she is so unhappy in her own life. She alternately wants to be free of her relationships and family and desperately wants them to never go away. I found myself frequently thinking "stop waffling and commit" because of how much time the text spends inside her head.

However, I love her as a police detective, and I loved this particular crime-solving tale. Lukas and Matis are undocumented Lithuanian immigrants to England, living in squalor in effective slavery. The townsfolk hate them because they think the Lithuanians are taking their jobs and women. The neighbor particularly hates Lukas because he has been sleeping with his wife, and another hates Matis because he's spent time with his impressionable daughter. The Lithuanian bosses use them ruthlessly and are apt to disappear them if trouble arises. One fellow resident of the house gets sick. Rather than get medical care for him, they let him die and disappear his body.

All of these people are viable suspects when Lukas body is found hanging from a tree with a note reading "Mirusieji negali kalbėti" attached.

What I loved most about this is that the crime & investigation doesn't involve a bunch of improbable coincidences, and that the investigation is basic police legwork: interviews, reviewing surveillance video, reviewing logs of phone calls & license plate readers, etc. It's a mark of a good writer that Susie Steiner was able to craft a compelling story with twists & turns and do it without the improbable crutches so prevalent in the genre. It's a shame she died, as this book was the best of the series and I would have eagerly snapped up new entries. ( )

In Susie Steiner’s third and final police procedural, Remain Silent, Detective Inspector Manon Bradshaw of Cambridgeshire Constabulary is back on the job after giving birth to Teddy, working cold cases instead of fresh murders. This promptly changes though when she makes a gruesome discovery. Early one morning in Hinchingbrooke Park, while out with her son, now a toddler, she stumbles across a body hanging from a tree, an apparent suicide. The dead man is a young migrant worker from Lithuania named Lukas Balsys. It turns out that little about the young man’s death is straightforward: for one thing, there’s a note attached to the body that, once translated from the Lithuanian, reads The dead cannot speak. Is this a suicide, or not? A staffing crunch means Manon is seconded to the investigation, teaming up with her old partner: earnest, by-the-book DI Davy Walker. As usual with Manon Bradshaw, she plunges headlong into the case, ends up juggling several balls at once, none entirely successfully, and her abrasive people skills get up the nose of her superiors. Her home life is messy, Teddy is a handful, and in the midst of everything her partner Mark suffers a health crisis and ends up in hospital. Thank the lord for her adopted teenage son Fly, who, with his calm willingness to pitch in, sometimes seems like the only adult in the room. The Balsys case links to an investigation into migrant exploitation focused in Wisbech, a small market town where anti-immigrant sentiments are running high and threats of violence against newcomers are common. The police pick up clues here and there, seemingly making headway, but the case is multi-faceted, little is obvious, and the perpetrators are smart and ruthless. Steiner’s novel features multiple narrators and plot threads aplenty. Manon remains the same shrewd and observant but unfiltered, bull-in-a-china-shop investigator that made such a strong impression on readers in the first two novels in the series. Human and achingly flawed, she’s still speaking her mind, still besieged by myriad responsibilities, still attracted to comfort food and clashing with the dreaded work-life balance. The backstory—the how and why of Lukas Balsys’s journey to England—is fleshed out over several chapters that probably could have been shorter. But Remain Silent is still a worthy addition to the series: a suspenseful, timely, thoroughly entertaining novel that uses Europe’s immigration crisis as a backdrop to a poignant story of human desperation and sacrifice. ( )

I found the mystery interesting, and the book easy to breeze through. Parts were quite sobering, and others were humorous, so it was a nice mix, like life. ( )

This was a tough read - set against the background of trafficked illegal workers, and the hatred the locals feel for them. Lots of brutality, violence, and menace. Eastern European illegal worker is found hanged, with a note suggesting it was murder. That seems likely, given that local yobs are demonstrating against the EEs who are stealing their jobs (the ones they won't take). Manon and Davy investigate the crime, and as in the previous books, there's a lot about their outside of work lives. Manon is exhausted and wondering if her relationship with Mark is worth keeping; Davy is flirting with another officer and wondering if his life with Juliette is already settling into a boring routine. We know, from flashbacks, that the murdered man left his home in search of adventure and to escape the boring routine he sees in his future.

I liked this a lot; I was a little bit skeptical about the revelation of the crime, but that's okay. ( )

I really enjoy Susie Steiner's characters and the plot was excellent--with a twist too! ( )