She Treads Softly: Black Notice

Sunday, September 14, 2025

Black Notice

Black Notice by Joy Ellis
9/9/25; 467 pages
Joffe Books
DI Jackman & DS Evans #11

Black Notice by Joy Ellis is a highly recommended complex and detailed procedural and crime thriller. This is the eleventh book in the DI Rowan Jackman and DS Marie Evans series.

On the Lincolnshire fens Detectives Rowan Jackman and Marie Evans have three cases that come to them. First a retired officer Bob Ruston has a terrified bloodstained man with a handcuff dangling from his wrist ring his doorbell and ask for help. The man leaves before police arrive. Second a wife walks into the Saltern-le-Fen police station and asks Marie to help her find her husband who was just released from prison. Third a homeowner discovers the decomposing remains of five bodies tangled together in an old WW2 pillbox. Woven between these cases is a planned art theft and a hacker called Chaos causing trouble for criminals. All these disparate threads eventually connect and reach a conclusion.

This is a well-written procedural which follows the investigation of several intricate, complicated cases. The clues are logically followed as more information is uncovered in the various investigations and includes several twists along the way. A Black Notice means unidentified human remains, so readers will know what is going to be happening, although the number is surprising. The various cases are interesting, but it did take me a while to actually get engaged with the novel. This was my first foray into the DI Jackman & DS Evans series and at times I did feel a little lost.

The characters are all portrayed as realistic, complicated individuals. Those who have been following the series will likely embrace all of them as known characters and be excited to follow their new investigation. They all certainly work well together as a team. As this was my first introduction to all of them I didn't quite have the background needed to fully appreciate them.

Black Notice will be best appreciated by those who enjoy procedurals and are following the series. Thanks to Joffe Books for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.