Blood and Judgement

[2] It introduces his most notable series character, Patrick Petrella, as a young and already somewhat controversial Detective Sergeant working out of the fictional Q Division of the Metropolitan Police Area.

The body of a woman is discovered hidden away in the bushes near a little-known part of London, the fictitious Binford Park Reservoir, which, in spite of its size, importance, and somewhat rural aspects, is relatively inconspicuous and unknown even to its closest neighbors.

In spite of being mostly focused on the police and how they methodically track down, arrest, and have prosecuted various professional criminals, there are still surprising twists and turns in the story's plotting, in which apparently straightforward assumptions and/or characters are suddenly revealed to be something completely different.

And, in a final ironic twist, the odious gangster who has previously been arrested and convicted on a capital murder charge is set free on appeal and now looks to profit greatly from his legal tribulations by selling his story to the newspapers for a large amount of money.

As one of Gilbert's editors said after his death in 2006, "He's not a hard-boiled writer in the classic sense, but there is a hard edge to him, a feeling within his work that not all of society is rational, that virtue is not always rewarded.".