In her fourteenth novel, in a career that began in 1980 with Fortress, Gabrielle Lord returns to the series of books that feature the troubled and trouble-attracting private investigator, Gemma Lincoln. Shattered, the fourth in the series, is the most densely and effectively plotted of them. Gathered here are key people from earlier novels: Gemma’s lover, the undercover policeman Steve Brannigan; her best friend, Sergeant Angie McDonald; a former street kid called the Ratbag; Gemma’s sometime colleague Mike Moody. Still shadowing Gemma’s life are the memories of the murder of her mother and, much later, her successful but nearly fatal efforts to clear her father of that crime. She has been left with an indelible sense of how perilous is the stability of family life. This is now the more pointed because Gemma is pregnant and unsure whether she will keep the child. Shattered begins with a double murder in sylvan Killara. Police Superintendent Bryson Finn (leader of the Skylark corruption task force) and his sister-in-law Bettina have been shot. Finn’s young son Donovan is critically wounded. Gemma is involved because Finn’s estranged widow, Natalie – police officer turned lawyer – hires her to discover what happened. This leads, inevitably, to the revelation of much seamy sexual business involving the dead man and his numerous conquests among young women on the force. While this case occupies her (and does so more intensely when one of her friends, the forensic detective Jaki Hunter, is fitted up as the killer), Gemma has other cases in hand. One concerns the missing contestant from the reality television show ‘Search for the Princess Bride’ (the prize: marriage to a louche European princeling). Others take us back to the emotional heart of all of Lord’s fiction.