The Playroom

The 2004 police procedural thriller The Playroom is the second novel in John Connor’s ongoing series about Detective Constable Karen Sharpe, a police officer with West Yorkshire Child Protection Unit. Drawing on his many years of experience as a barrister involved in some of the biggest drug and gang cases pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service, John Connor (the pseudonym of Tom Winship) now writes about a detective who is having trouble balancing her commitment to her job with her complex personal life.

The Playroom is set sometime during the 1990s in Yorkshire, the biggest county in England. It begins several months after the events of the first Karen Sharpe novel, Phoenix. Trying to come to terms with the repercussions of what happened then, Karen has once again dived into her job to avoid dealing with her emotional damage. This is par for the course for the tough, self-destructive character, who is an amalgam of typical anti-heroic cop traits: she doesn’t play by the rules, dislikes and distrusts authority, investigates doggedly despite being told not to, and forsakes her personal life to do her job better.

However, now the stakes of this kind of escapism are higher because the first novel ended with Karen reconnecting with her daughter Mairead. The problem is that Maired thinks that Karen is her aunt—a way to explain why Karen hasn’t seen the girl since she was born and to avoid discussing Karen’s relationship with Mairead’s father, who is now serving a life sentence. Karen’s guilt about her fractured relationship with her daughter is compounded by the fact that she is living with a man she doesn’t really love—Neil, a lawyer who isn’t particularly fleshed out in the novel.



The novel follows two cases, which turn out to have a sinister connection.

First, Karen is contacted by a woman who has suddenly remembered that ten years ago, when she was thirteen years old, she was kidnapped and raped. The woman recently saw the man who did this on TV—local Member of Parliament Geoffrey Reed—which triggered these memories. The problem, of course, is that recovered memory cases are very difficult to investigate and prove, especially when so much time has elapsed between the alleged crime and the present day.

Meanwhile, on her thirteenth birthday, Sophie Kenyon, the daughter of a judge from Bradford (a town in West Yorkshire) is kidnapped. Knowing that the first twenty-four hours are the most critical for finding and saving a child in an abduction case, the police form a massive, fifty-detective investigation in order to field all the tips flooding the Child Protection Unit. The team works around the clock, their work, dubbed Operation Shade, led by Senior Investigative Officer John Munro. In the series’ previous novel, Karen and Munro butted heads so much that both of them needed time to put their careers back on track. Now, in retribution, Munro has expressly left Karen off the Operation Shade team.



Both investigations start to hit roadblocks that are clearly being put in place deliberately. Then, witnesses start dying, and the detectives worry that they are dealing with a highly organized pedophile ring operating in the area.

At the same time, it becomes increasingly clear that the cases are linked through a connection between what happened in the past and what is happening in the present. As a result, the assistant chief constable insists that Karen Sharpe be included in Operation Shade—after all, her case might shed light on that of Sophie Kenyon. On the team, Karen connects with a fellow renegade police officer, DC Pete Bains. Pete is a kindred spirit whose manner is so similar to Karen that they become a formidable duo, pursuing leads on their own, refusing to follow standard procedures, and making headway because of their unwillingness to ever let any lead go. Amusingly, both Karen and Pete also hate communicating electronically with anyone, never answering their phone or pager if they can at all help it.

In the end, the resolution of the crime turns out to hinge on the still unresolved events from a year earlier. Back then, Karen’s senior officer on the drug squad was shot and killed in an incident so murky that some part of the West Yorkshire Police partly blames her. After the kidnappers have been cornered, the novel explodes in a bloodbath, before the young victim is found and rescued.



Karen realizes that she and Pete have more in common than a shared attitude to police work, and at the end of the novel, she has left Neil in order to pursue a romantic relationship with Pete—a relationship that will come to a crashing stop in the next novel in the series.