Play with Fire by William Shaw

At a Rolling Stones concert in a London park in 1967, “young women in cut-off jeans revel in the easy power of beauty.” Off duty and with friends, Detective Cathal Breen watches the euphoric crowd and worries that wherever they see “peace and transcendence,” he sees “the potential for crime and disaster.”

Interrupted in the middle of a murder investigation, Cathal is approached by an agent from MI6 and asked to sign the Official Secrets Act (1920). The man calling himself Sand explains his view: "our freedom in the West depends on…Intelligence…a delicate network of truths, half-truths, and lies. The power in the network is in discovering how much other people know, or think they know” in order to “know where they are in the web of relationships,” and “have power over the network itself.”

Using the royal We, Sand boasts of how MI6 manipulates its agents for the good of the country. According to him, the perfect spy is “not very good, but arrogant enough to think he is.”

But Cathal is not a trader in secrets, and has no interest in power games. Nor is he pleased to let another agency interfere with his case. In pursuit of simple justice, he wants only to find the killer and see him charged with the crime.

In this goal he is abetted by his girlfriend Helen Tozer, a former WPC. Now advanced in pregnancy, Helen no longer works as a policewoman, but she hasn’t lost her instinct to solve crimes. Behind Cathal’s protective back, she lends her police instincts to the case. Alas, their quest for justice proves far from simple.

Trying to solve a murder at work is not Cathal’s only conundrum. His personal relationship with Helen is also challenging. Will she like the modern ring he’s bought her? Afraid to give it to her, he hides it for several days in his sock drawer. Meanwhile, a more important question is whether, for her own safety, Helen will do as he asks and keep away from danger. After all, she’s only a month away from delivering her child. When he tries to restrain her, she Impatiently ripostes that she is not disabled, only pregnant. As Cathal had feared, her interference courts more trouble than she expects.

In this fourth book in the series, Breen and Tozer are back. Tozer is brash as Breen is self-effacing. Together they’re a great team.