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Fade to Grey is the third Mike Croft novel, and Jane Adams uses the entry to deepen the character's emotional life. Croft is investigating a missing-persons case that has gone cold years before, with the family now elderly and quietly resigned. The investigation widens to involve a piece of stolen art and a long-running fraud in a way that earns its complications.
Adams's strength is the moral patience of her prose. The book is happy to sit with the family's grief, with Croft's own discomfort about disturbing it, with the slow accumulation of small details that may or may not amount to anything. When the resolution arrives, it earns its weight rather than performing it.
Four stars. One of the stronger entries in the early Mike Croft series. Read in order.
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