Behind Closed Doors

Behind Closed Doors is the Elizabeth Haynes novel where she takes her psychological-thriller sensibility into more straight procedural territory. DCI Lou Smith and her Kent-based team are working a years-old missing-person case (a 15-year-old girl who walked away from a family holiday in Greece and was never found) when a young woman walks into a police station in northern England claiming to be the missing girl.

Haynes's structural signature is alternating chapters that gradually fill in the past while the present-day procedural builds. The technique works in this book partly because the missing-girl chapters from a decade earlier are written with the kind of patient interior attention that the form usually does not allow. The procedural in the present is more straightforward.

The book is more conventional than Human Remains. The strengths are still there: the careful research, the moral attention to the protagonist's emotional cost, the institutional realism. Four stars. Read after Human Remains.