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After Effects is one of the later Inspector Sloan novels, and Catherine Aird is at her most procedural. A pharmaceutical company's drug trial has produced two dead trial participants. Sloan and Crosby are sent in. The investigation widens to take in the company's ethics board, the trial nurses, and a doctor who may or may not have falsified his patient enrollment.
Aird's strength has always been the calm precision of her detail. She writes institutional life as if she has spent careful hours in actual meetings with chief executives and ethics committees, and that texture is the book's pleasure. The mystery itself is fair but a little dry.
Three stars. Solid mid-period Aird, recommended only after the better-known earlier books in the series.
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