JONNY LEE MILLER IN PRIME SUSPECT 3

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The "Prime Suspect" series has been one of the most popular offerings on the PBS television show "Mystery". It features detailed police procedures and forensic work, a socially conscious and grittily realistic view of contemporary Britain, and a tough driven heroine, DCI Jane Tennison, (wonderfully played on television by Helen Mirren) who must fight the sexism and bureaucratic mindset of her co-workers while she hunts monstrous criminals. Between the overlapping dialogue and the working-class accents, it's easy to miss things on television, so the books have an advantage in this respect. The book is written in a plain straightforward style, but is not just a hollow "novelization"; a mystery fan can enjoy it perfectly well without seeing the show.

Tennison has been transferred to the Soho Vice Squad in this book. She is supposed to give top priority to a crackdown on "rent boys", underage male prostitutes. When one of these boys, Colin "Connie" Jenkins, is found dead after a fire in a drag queen's apartment, the murder investigation becomes her real priority, even though her bosses threaten to transfer the case to another department.

Two of the best things about this book are its depictions of gender relations, and of the underclass in contemporary Britain. Tennison heads a large team; as a good manager, she must handle sexism from her subordinates as well as her superiors, and always asserts herself to ensure their respect and obedience -- but her troubled romantic life always seems to play second-fiddle to her career. The other social concern in this book is homelessness in post-Thatcher London: we see homeless boys waiting for leftovers in the National Film Theatre cafeteria, and residents of a graveyard drinking two liter bottles of Woodpecker cider (a yuppie bar treat in the States) to feel warm at night. Details like these recreate the dark, rainy, claustrophobic feel of the TV show.

This book has all the elements of the successful Prime Suspect formula; one of television's best mystery series is also a fine series of novels. One warning: the book gives away the solution to Prime Suspect 2 in the first paragraph on page 29.

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Prime Suspect 3, 1993 Review by Tracy Thomas

DCI Tennison (Helen Mirren) has been transferred to Vice. Her assignment is to round up the young male prostitutes, or "rent boys," and their clients, or "punters" in a flurry of morality. But when one of the boys burns to death in the apartment of a frightened transsexual, the same upstanding administrators who sent her to make the streets safe try to keep her from investigating the murder.

It doesn't stop her, of course, and tensions mount as her focus shifts from the sleezy and often violent pimp (David Thewlis) to the darling of the department, Edward Parker Jones, the head of a center for troubled boys (Ciaran Hinds), and possibly a pedophile.

In the midst of this, an former lover in town on a lecture circuit prompts Tennison to re-evaluate her life's decisions. At the conclusion, loose ends lie strewn about. All choices are tainted with regret, and yet, the element of truth in that messiness is, ultimately, quite satifying.

Mirren captivates her audience again as Jane Tennison, this time exploring the character even more thoroughly and fearlessly than in the first two episodes. Here Tennison fights for every decision, even those in her past. In a scene with her former lover at his hotel, she shows us what she's given up for her job, not by explaining it to him, not by breaking down in tears, but by glancing at his hair as she stands behind him.

This is perhaps the most wrenching of the Prime Suspect series, because it has children at its focus, abused in a world of drugs, sex, and AIDS by unscrupulous adults, and because that focus intensifies Tennison's own struggle over the choices she has made and the one she faces when she finds herself pregnant.

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