Dead Before Morning #1 Rafferty & Llewellyn procedural

ABOUT THE SERIES

DI Joe Rafferty, working-class lapsed Catholic, is cursed by coming from a family who think - if he must be a copper - he might at least have the decency to be a bent one. When you add the middle-class, moralistic intellectual DS Dafyd Llewellyn to the brew the result is murder with plenty of laughs for the reader and plenty of angst for Rafferty.

BOOK BLURB (in seventeen chapters, plus an epilogue)
Detective Inspector Joe Rafferty has just been promoted. Then he lands the case from Hell, one involving a corpse with a mutilated face, a private psychiatric hospital and Dr Anthony Melville-Briggs, the suave, social-climbing owner, who thinks his money can buy everything, even the police.

As if that isn't enough, his Ma, Kitty Rafferty, has another little problem for him: to get his distant cousin out of the cells in time for his wedding. Against his better judgement, Rafferty promises to get his cousin sprung, though he is careful not to give a time-scale for the Great Escape.

Struggling, with no solution in sight, it is only when he is reminded of his forgotten promise and goes to see his jail-bird cousin, that Rafferty begins to put the case to bed.