This post is about the 2019 book, not the acclaimed TV series on which it is based.

Prime Suspect is a British police procedural television series (1991 – 2006) devised by Lynda La Plante. It stars Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison, one of the first female Detective Chief Inspectors in Greater London‘s Metropolitan Police Service, who rises to the rank of Detective Superintendent while confronting institutionalised sexism within the police force.

… voted 68th in the list of 100 Greatest British Television Programmes as compiled by a poll given by the British Film Institute, and in 2007 it was listed as one of Time magazine’s “100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME.”

Prime Suspect — the book — was published by Lynda La Plante in 2019, long after the end of the TV series.

Not nearly as good.

I found DCI Jane Tennison mostly annoying.

The pace too slow.

Not recommended.

When a prostitute is found murdered in her bedsit, the Metropolitan police set to work finding the perpetrator of this brutal attack. DNA samples lead them straight to known criminal George Marlow. The police think they’ve found their man, but things are not quite what they seem….

Desperate to remove all doubt around her suspect, Tennison struggles to make the charges stick. And then a second body turns up.

With the team against her, DCI Jane Tennison is in a race against time to catch a dangerous criminal ­- and prove she’s just as tough as any man.

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A glutton for punishment, I next read Prime Suspect 3 – Silent Victims (2019).

Better — but I still wanted to push Jane Tennison into the river.

When a body is found in one of London’s poorest districts, the coroner’s report identifies the victim as young, black and female, but impossibly anonymous. 

One thing is clear to Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison about this victim – that news of her murder will tear apart a city already cracking with racial tensions, hurling Scotland Yard and Tennison herself into a maelstrom of shocking accusations and sudden, wrenching violence. 

As London’s brutal killer remains at large, Tennison is locked in a struggle to overcome her station house’s brutal chauvinism and insidious politicking. And as the department’s deeply rooted racism rears its head and threatens to overshadow every facet of her new investigation, the trail of her prime suspect is growing colder. 

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I didn’t get very far into Prime Suspect 2 – A Face in the Crowd.