Blurred Reality // The Geordie Murder

After the operation to repair his diseased eyes, Eric Ward is left with clear vision, but a sense of time and place that is greatly altered-a blurred reality. He now finds himself in a world where the kidnapping of a child can be seen as life-threatening or life-saving, depending on how you look at it, a world where small-time crooks fall prey to larger predators, and a chain of sinister favors leads to multiple murder.
In his law practice along the lonely waterfront of the Tyneside, Eric Ward has to be as tough as his clients. The ex-cop needs all his street smarts when he resolves to stop a vicious moneylender from squeez¬ing the lifeblood out of the community. And he needs all his sensitivity to unravel the kidnapping of Kate Cullen-daughter of an unemployed shipyard worker, grand¬daughter of a millionaire.
On his way to the truth, Eric locks horns with his old friends, the police-and with people wealthy enough to buy justice. Ward's view of his own marriage also seems to blur as his wife Anne, independently wealthy and twenty years his junior, starts spending a troublesome amount of time with a lawyer her own age.

Roy LEWIS has chronicled Eric Ward's career and fight with glaucoma in a series of compassionate, forceful novels that have won the hearts of mystery readers, A Blurred Reality may well be the best yet.