Anything for You is book three of the Valerie Hart detective series. I had not read the preceding two novels, but the author does such a nice job of weaving character history and backstory into the text that I didn’t in any way feel like I was missing out on necessary information.

The narrative begins with a couple driving to a romantic rendezvous in the country. It is clear from the beginning that the actual encounter will wind up being something quite different – and indeed it is, with the ending involving not sex but murder.

We then shift to an entirely different scene. An elderly male insomniac, up late reading, finds himself facing an intruder through a window. The excellent alarm system in his son’s upscale home goes off, turning on the exterior lights and chasing the trespasser away but the police are still called. As the cops do a routine inspection of the now quiet scene, they receive a second call sending them to the house next door. What they find there is the opposite of the peaceful setting they just left.

In this elegant home, in the tastefully decorated master bedroom, a man has been brutally murdered. Lying just a few feet away, desperately clinging to her phone and her life, lies his wife. The investigators quickly establish that this is the abode of Adam Grant, a well-known San Francisco prosecutor and his wife Rachel. Their daughter Elspeth is missing.

Homicide detective Valerie Hart almost had a one night stand with the deceased several years earlier. Their drunken kisses and sloppy groping never actually led to sex since the married Adam had a last minute attack of conscience and called a halt to the proceedings. Valerie knows that she should remove herself from the case due to her personal connection to the victim, but she has a storied sexual history, along with something of a (past) promiscuous reputation  and doesn’t want to air this bit of dirty laundry for the amusement of her colleagues. She determines to move forward and work the case, confident she won’t encounter a conflict of interest.

She does quickly encounter Elspeth, who had been staying overnight at a friend’s house, and then meets Adam’s wife Rachel at the hospital. She’s impressed with both of them, beautiful ladies who handle this horrific change to their lives with dignified sorrow and grace. And she’s embarrassed at having to comb through their home and their pasts, looking for clues as to who did this and why. Adam’s job seems to be the likeliest motive for the crime and indeed initial forensic evidence points to Dwight Jenner, an ex-con Adam helped to convict earlier in his career. Valerie is nothing if not thorough however, and her perseverance and curiosity pay off. Hidden in a cabinet in Adam’s basement darkroom within a stack of plain manilla envelopes are nude photographs taken in the kitchen and bedrooms of the Grant house featuring a sexy blonde with her face obscured. A woman who just happens to match the description of Jenner’s latest lady love. But why would pictures of her be in the Grant house? Discovering the answer to that question leads Valerie down a dark and dangerous path through prostitution, child sexual abuse, and vengeance.

Fans of mystery novels will recognize Valerie’s hard-boiled detective persona. She’s the type of cop who eats and sleeps the job, whose put-upon spouse has to deal with her moody, broody compulsiveness regarding her cases, and whose proverbial soft interior is buried beneath layers of cynicism and sarcastic wit. The author also does little to paint nuance onto her character or indeed onto any of the characters we are introduced to, except the villain. They all have secrets, some of them fairly large, but they are all pretty straightforward in spite of them and the only twists and turns here occur in the plot.

Even that isn’t very curvy. This is a methodical, detailed police procedural where solid investigating and following hunches lead to a stunning but well set up ending. The dénouement did surprise me, but I could look back and see how the trail inevitably led to this conclusion. I love when the author can make the resolution a revelation but also show you how the clues were pointing in that direction all along and that definitely happened here. I always find that kind of closure deeply satisfying.

In fact, for fans of detective fiction Anything for You is satisfying overall. While the story doesn’t transcend genre or push this category of fiction to new limits, it does a decent job of meeting its standards.

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