Published by Atlantic Crime on August 11, 2026
The DS George Cross books are among the most entertaining police detective novels in current crime literature. Reading them in order would help readers understand the evolution of George’s relationships with his family and co-workers, but each book in the series has a self-contained plot, so readers can easily enjoy The Tailor without reading the earlier novels.
The story begins with the murder on a train of William Titcomb, a tailor who makes bespoke suits in Bristol. Titcomb’s body is found with a freezer bag over his head, but the killer apparently cut his throat after Titcomb managed to poke a hole in the bag with his pen.
To get to the bottom of the crime, George interviews Titcomb’s wife Min and his sister Gwen, who worked alongside Titcomb in his shop. Min is employed by a super-secret business that is developing batteries. When the corpse of an employee of the battery business is found with a freezer bag over his head, George suspects the police were wrong to chalk up the death as a suicide.
George also discovers that Titcomb was Toby Fletcher’s tailor. George met Fletcher (who George knows to be a British spy) in connection with an earlier investigation. He learns that Fletcher introduced Min to Titcomb in college. Fletcher’s role in the intrigue only becomes clear at the story’s end.
Titcomb maintained a workshop in China where his less expensive suits were assembled. He was taking the train to Heathrow to catch a flight to Dubai, where he planned to deliver two suits to customers of the firm before moving on to the workshop in China. Titcomb’s suitcase and suit carriers were stolen from the train (and the lining torn from the suit Titcomb was wearing), leading George to surmise that the killer was searching for something that Titcomb was transporting.
The murder mystery takes on elements of a spy novel when certain characters, including a Chinese apprentice in Titcomb’s shop and a couple of South Korean killers, raise George’s suspicions. George pulls at the threads of mystery until concocted stories unravel and he discovers the motivation for Titcomb’s murder.
Along the way, George manages to get himself abducted, a bit more action than he desires. George bicycles to work every day but he is far from an action hero. These books rely on old fashioned deduction rather than fistfights and shootouts to hold a reader’s interest. George is not someone who is likely to escape from armed captors unless he bores them to death as he analyzes their criminal motives and suggests improvements in the meals they bring him.
Like his father (a retired aeronautics engineer), George likes to know how things work, a trait that drove him to learn the intricacies of the drycleaning business in The Patient and bicycle racing in The Cyclist. George devotes the same obsessive interest to the process of making a bespoke suit in The Tailor. His former partner and new superior DI Ottey has learned that this is “all part of his oblique information-gathering process.”
Lectures about how things work can become tedious (for example, the whaling industry in Moby-Dick or glove manufacturing in American Pastoral), but Tim Sullivan manages to pique my interest in subjects without providing so much detail that I grow bored with them. And fortunately for the plot, Cross always learns something that helps him solve the crime.
Sullivan always adds human interest to his stories by exploring Cross’ relationship with his aging parents. In The Tailor, Cross’ father Raymond can no longer tolerate living with Cross’ mother and moves in with Cross, much to Cross’ horror. A suitable solution to Raymond’s impulsive behavior satisfies everyone except Raymond, but he’s placated by an arrangement that allows him to restore his model train set to a spare bedroom.
As is customary in DS Cross novels, the story moves quickly and the plot — while less complex than most entries in the series — has a few surprising twists. At this point, I enjoy the novels as much for George’s autism and his struggles to understand the importance of good manners as the mysteries that George solves. The other novels in the series have stronger plots and more cunning mysteries, but The Tailor delivers enough of George’s amusing peccadillos to make me glad I didn’t miss it.
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