Maddox finally realizes how great Carstairs is, a woman D’Arcy is dating finally figures out D’Arcy’s rather unusual first name, and the Hollywood Wilcox Precinct is busier than ever in this marvelous entry in the Ivor Maddox/Susan Carstairs police procedural series penned by the Queen of police procedurals, Elizabeth Linington.

The cases come fast and furious for the gang at the Hollywood Wilcox station. Linington does a wonderful job of keeping track of it all; the reader can simply relax and enjoy the ride. A nice young man working at a gas station is murdered, a respected doctor who no one would seemingly want to harm is missing without a clue, a string of vandalism has to be dealt with, a bank is robbed, an angry man accosted and propositioned by another male in a non-gay bar wants charges filed. Just about any crime you can imagine, big or small, is thrown at Maddox, D’Arcy, the always-mystery-reading Céaser Rodriguez, Daisy and Sue, and a new man full of charm and blarney who raises Maddox’s hackles because he seems to be making a play for Carstairs — and getting somewhere.

Maddox has his Maserati in this one, but seemingly doesn’t have a clue what’s really bothering him about the attention Johnny is heaping on Officer Carstairs. He also doesn’t have a clue how to get to the bottom of more than one case puzzling the entire precinct, including the murder of a medium with a gun that’s gone through more hands than a seasoned working girl. D’Arcy’s exhausting legwork in backtracking the weapon will eventually lead to another body, and a break in a totally — on the surface — unrelated case. As will Maddox finally figuring out the identity of the man who propositioned for money a truck driver connect with a very different and much more serious open case.

A couple of cases are connected in ways unforeseeable, yet completely logical and true-to-life when unraveled in the fifth entry of this marvelous series. Blending the personal lives of her officers with the arduous and often — from the public — thankless task of investigating crime and protecting the city’s citizenry was something Linington did better than any other writer. Whether she was writing under her Dell Shannon moniker, her Lesley Egan pseudonym, Anne Blaisdell or Elizabeth Linington, she never failed to make it work. Her gift for dialog, how people actually speak, the broken sentences and jumping around, is so good as to be jarring at first to todays readers — because you so rarely come across it portrayed so accurately in fiction in our day.

She was also conservative, refreshingly pro-police, and not afraid to portray accurately the views of the majority, including cops, about segments of society. More than once — actually several times as I recall — a cop notes the decline of society, and remarks on Satan working overtime, lamenting what the country’s populous is coming to. In essence, this has the effect, by the end, of making the story feel remarkably fresh, as if it was written last week rather than in 1968. Her conservatism and her honesty are perhaps the reason, in my opinion, this wildly popular in her own time — for decades — writer is so rarely championed, or given a paperback reprint, as her contemporary, Ed McBain, recently had. She is however widely available on Kindle; all four series and several one-off mysteries are available to download and enjoy.

Some latitude as to police methods of the time must naturally be allowed for by the reader when devouring a McBain or Linington police procedural. Any book chronicling the methods of crime detection from a different era must. All too often, however, readers bandy about the overused term, “out of date” because they’ve applied it to morality and social views brought forth in the narrative which are more in line with traditional values, common sense, and various religious teachings (both Christian and otherwise) that they personally no longer believe. Those values are what you’ll find within the pages of Policeman’s Lot — and in fact, all her police procedurals written from the 1960s thru the 1980s. Different and more traditional views from your own, does not always make them “out of date.” Linington might, were she alive today, be of the opinion that it is the tried-and-failed “values” and “morality” of ancient Sodom and Gomorrah that are “out of date.”

This is a terrific read and a terrific series, as is her Luis Mendoza (writing as Dell Shannon) and Vic Varallo (writing as Lesley Egan) series. Mendoza in fact broke barriers and forged new ground when she created a Hispanic cop in Los Angeles who was in a position of authority way back when. I can’t recommend this book, or Linington’s work, any more highly than I do on as regular a basis as is possible. Policeman’s Lot was an excellent read and well-worth the trouble I had to go to in order to obtain a decent hardback copy with dust jacket. Of another time before all the uber-sensitive, victimhood embracing, PC, SJW, moral free-for-all madness, so absolutely Timeless. ( )