Book review: Whole Life Sentence by Lynda LaPlante

I stumbled across Whole Life Sentence by Lynda LaPlante on my iPad while looking through books that were free as part of my Prime TV subscription. I completely missed its release last year but have read and enjoyed the series a lot. I picked that book nine, A Taste of Blood was nearing the point that (Young) Jane Tennison (reintroduced as a naïve, young—and rare—WPC!) becomes the crustier version we meet in Prime Suspect in 1991, before seeing a tweet by the author confirming book ten would be the last.

Newly promoted Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison has elbowed her way into the Area Major Incident Pool, or AMIP, an elite team investigating non-domestic murders.

With her new position, she hopes things will change: the rampant sexism, the snide remarks, the undermining. Then she gets her first assignment: a five-year-old cold case of a missing teenager no one else has any interest in investigating, and an assumed suicide Tennison suspects is, in fact, murder.

But as Tennison gathers the crucial evidence to secure arrests, her new colleagues watch like vultures circling prey. And one by one the cases that she has built from the ground up are taken from her - and the glory along with them.

Tennison has seen it all before - but this time feels different. Get the job done here and she will rise to a level never before reached by a woman. It's hers for the taking. She just has to do what she's been doing brilliantly for years: find her prime suspect . . .

This opens as Jane’s about to have her DCI interview and decides she wants to apply to the new Area Major Incident Team (AMIT), a sought-after gig whose membership initially seems off-limits given her gender. Surprisingly she gets the opportunity though it very much feels like we’ve stepped back into early novels in the series where her presence was barely tolerated. Here she’s handed an inexperienced constable as her offsider and given a five-year old cold-case while the two other AMIT DCIs get the high profile cases.

LaPlante often includes several investigations for the price of one and it happens here – kinda… in that one of her fellow DCIs asks her to look into the suicide of a friend’s wife, but as she as she starts to  get somewhere, the colleague takes [the case] back, uses Jane’s suppositions to solve it, and gives her no credit.

Jane makes some real progress in the cold-case (involving a missing college student) and is close to solving it when others swoop in again. It angers Jane of course and she feels like throwing in the towel. She comes across as a bit harder here and I guess it’s part of that journey to the more hard-core Tennison we meet in Prime Suspect. She’s often unpleasant to her poor supporting constable (who I felt worked hard and demonstrates a surprising amount of initiative given her lack of experience). And then there’s a turning point in the end where Jane has to make a call on what she’s willing to do to get where she wants to be.

This was a ‘dense’ read and took several nights (given I only read in the bath). I must confess to being a little less interested in her burgeoning romance here, the cynic in me waiting for Jane to learn he was a psychopath or similar. But this is packed with layers of texture and LaPlante is—as always—scrupulous in her attention to detail reminding us why she became the queen of police procedurals and why her books (and TV series) garnered popularity and accolades when first released… dealing with distasteful fodder in a way that allowed us to separate our reaction to the crime and experience of the victim and focus on the investigation itself.