Blind Lead - First Day: First Day

She was sent to watch him. She never expected to need him. DC Mara Slade arrives at DS Frank Calloway's unit with a file she has read in full and an assignment she cannot disclose. He is fifty-four, thirty years in, three from retirement, and not happy about any of this. When a curator is found dead in a locked Mayfair art gallery - staged to look like a fall, the staging wrong - they have two weeks to untangle a forgery network that reaches into the private intelligence world, a name that makes Calloway go still the first time she says it, and a photograph that neither of them is ready to explain. Blind Lead is a British police procedural built around two fundamentally incompatible detectives and one slow-burning family secret that will take twenty books to fully surface. Every case plants a clue. Every clue means something else. Book One of twenty. For readers of Ann Cleeves, Peter James, and Peter Robinson. Tonally between Inspector Morse and Bodyguard - cerebral, patient, with emotional beats that earn their keep. The series takes its title from a hunting term: a blind lead is a trail that appears to end but in fact continues - you just cannot see where yet.