I think I have someone in the UK Crime Book Club on Facebook to thank for mentioning Roger Parkes (1933-2008), who was a British screenwriter and a novelist. Primarily known for his work on British television, he also turned out about a dozen novels. The Dark Number (Constable, 1973) was co-written with Edward Boyd and won the 1975 Grand Prix for Detective Literature. He only wrote three books about Detective-Inspector Taff Roberts, none of which seem to have been published in the United States.
The first of the three, An Abuse of Justice (Collins, 1988), finds Roberts a new transfer from the Met police to the Thames Valley force, owing to an internal political disagreement with upper management. Nothing was documented but Roberts still felt a black mark was on his record. As such, he couldn’t really argue with his assignment, as distasteful as it was to be handed oversight of the indecency unit, what would be known in the U.S. as sex crimes or vice.
A local pedophile named Len Snow was running amok, assaulting the pre-teen girls in the area for years but he was careful about leaving evidence and the only hope of a conviction under English law was the courtroom appearance of his traumatized victims. Even if her parents allowed her to testify and they generally wouldn’t, a child would never be able to stand the strain of the judicial process and being faced with her molester to deliver credible testimony. Snow was arrested multiple times and he managed to escape conviction again and again due to lack of evidence that met the legal standard. Roberts’ predecessor had retired with something close to a mental breakdown from the stress of knowing what Snow was and being unable to stop him.
Soon after Roberts took over his new job, Snow was up to his tricks again and Roberts saw firsthand how easily Snow escaped punishment and how damaged his victims were. His Welsh sense of morality was outraged and he became determined to bring Snow to account despite the loopholes in the law.
This is an unusual piece of crime fiction in a couple of ways. No murder occurs, which is almost essential in a detective story, and while it is a legal thriller, it lacks much of the courtroom theatrics usually associated with the genre. It is also a police procedural, outlining in detail the investigation and compilation of evidence for the trial. It does have a few surprises carefully planted. Well written and tightly plotted, recommended for fans of the atypical, of legal thrillers, and of police procedurals.