A DEADLY THAW By Sarah Ward Minotaur, 384 pages, $36.99

The scene is a town in Derbyshire. The husband of a local resident named Lena Grey has just turned up murdered in a longabandoned morgue. Fairly straightforward? To be sure, but the catch is that Lena Grey is just out of prison after serving 14 years for killing the same husband all that time ago. This is a nifty beginning to a more than routine police procedural, but as the complex story unwinds, it becomes a far-reaching examination of police attitudes to the crime of sexual assault. This is not theoretical, dry-as-dust analytical stuff, but rather a human recounting of the male attitudes that self-justify the assaults and the female responses that lock them in victim roles. So acutely done are Sarah Ward’s depictions that readers of both genders are likely to grind their teeth in anger at what they find in A Deadly Thaw.