It’s A Mystery: “The dead can’t lie.”

The Hanging ClubBy Tony ParsonsMinotaur, 2016Tony Parsons is an award-winning journalist and the author of more than ten novels. Among them are Man and Boy (1999), which won the British Book of the Year prize in 2001, Man and Wife, and One For My Baby. In 2002, Man and Boy was made into a television movie by the BBC.Parsons made his crime fiction debut with The Murder Man (2014). It introduced London homicide detective DC Max Wolfe. He’s a single parent raising his five-year-old daughter Scout (surely homage to Harper Lee’s character of the same name in her great novel To Kill a Mockingbird). Together they’re trying to tame Stan, a small red Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, who was Wolfe’s birthday present to Scout. Wolfe is a boxer and an insomniac addicted to triple espressos. He’s also a wiseass with his colleagues at Homicide and Serious Crimes Command, and a singled-minded, two-fisted badass when it comes to catching criminals. He reminds me of one of my favorite detectives, Robert Parker’s Spenser. The Murder Man was a bestseller in the UK and the U.S.By the time the second Max Wolfe thriller, The Slaughter Man (2015), appeared the detective’s fans were legion. The third in the series, The Hanging Club, has just come out and it fulfills the promise of the first two and then some.It begins as Wolfe and his Murder Investigation Team view a video of a group of masked individuals abducting and hanging Mahmud Irani, a taxi driver whom they discover was once convicted of molesting underage girls but served a light sentence. As the team watches in horror the rope is tightened around the victim’s neck. As they try to come to grips (so to speak) with what they are watching, a panel appears in the corner of the big screen:

There was a black-and-white picture of a smiling rabbit-faced man from the middle of the last century. The account was called @AlbertPierrepointUK. No message. Just the hashtag -- #bringitback – and a link to the film.

The rabbit-faced man is Albert Pierrepoint, who, Wolfe explains, was Britain’s most famous hangman before he retired to run a pub: “He was the Elvis Presley of executioners…. He carried out more than four hundred executions, including a lot of the Nazis in Nuremberg.”The masks these assassins wear are of Pierrepoint’s face and in the panel of the TV screen they can see that AlbertPierrepointUK has gone viral.

TREND#bringitback

Over and over.

“I think somebody just brought back the death penalty,” [Wolfe] said.

The body is found in Hyde Park. And almost as soon as Wolfe and his team go into high gear, a second hanging is broadcast live. Hector Welles, thirty-five years old, killed a kid riding a bicycle. He was sentenced to five years but served a mere two. What is more significant is that the little boy who was killed was the grandson of Paul Warboys, a “career villain” with whom Wolfe has more than a nodding acquaintance!

Paul Warboys was the last of the line…. The last of those old gangsters whose names were known to the general public…. The very last of the true crime celebrities…. Back in the sixties and seventies…the Warboys brothers sucked the juice from the West End.

Wolfe and his colleague DC Edie Wren pay Warboys a visit. He’s served his time and he’s now a tanned, fit old man living quietly in the lap of luxury with his wife Doll. To Wolfe, beneath the man’s calm exterior, there’s rage simmering.

“I could still see the serious violence in the man.”…Edie had her notebook out. ‘Where were you when Hector Welleswas being hanged?’Under the deep tan, his face flushed with fury, the kind of fury that once enabledhim to order the amputation of an informer’s tongue. But then he laughed.‘I was home with Doll,’ he said.

It’s a feeble alibi and Warboys isn’t the least bit worried:

“My point is this,” Paul Warboys said quietly. “If I had killed the bastard that murdered my grandson with his car, I would have a much better alibi than the one I’ve got…. And I wouldn’t have done it online.”

Wolfe’s gut tells him he’s missing something. The question is what?Meanwhile, the public is out for blood and preferably from the arm of the law. There’s a Dickensian groundswell building that proclaims the rogue executioners are heroes. They’ve dubbed them The Hanging Club, a name that seems all too appropriate as a third man has his neck placed in a noose on live TV:

The phones all began to ring at once because they were about to reach the magic number. Three is the magic number.The Hanging Club were about to become serial killers.

The third man is a heroin addict named Darren Donovan. He mugged an old gentleman, retired Fleet Street printer and Normandy veteran, who is still in a coma. The online mob explodes and the prevailing sentiments remains “let ‘em dangle,” “I hope they get away with it,” and “Public executions are back.” Wolfe is a mass of conflicted feelings about the fragile line between the villainous and the virtuous. But then his boss’s son is savagely beaten by a punk the law can’t touch. DC Max Wolfe sees retribution in a whole new light.Again, as he did with his first two novels, Parsons gives us a range of fully developed, fascinating characters. With each novel we learn more about Wolfe and his colorful cohorts. Plus, Parsons's sense of place is palpable. It’s more than just a setting. Whether he’s describing the Black Museum at New Scotland Yard, taking us step by step through an excruciating death on the social network, or using the Smithfield meat market (a favorite of Dickens) as a metaphor, he draws the reader in.Parsons combines the bizarre and the banal to give us a brooding portrait of the compromise innocence makes to evil. I can’t wait for the next in the series._____Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.