Barry Maitland's Brock & Kolla series has been around for quite a while now, and it's quietly worked its way into the Must Read Pile.
From the Blurb:
A woman dies in her sleep in a houseboat on the Thames; the apparent cause of death, an unflued gas heater. It all seems straightforward, but DI Kathy Kolla isn't convinced. Both Kathy and DCI Brock run up against opposition in their investigation. An aggressive new Commander seems to have a different agenda, focusing on the new realities of economic constraints, and favouring emerging technologies over the traditional policing methods. Old-fashioned coppers like Brock and Kolla are being squeezed out. To make matters worse, there's a new Task Force moving in on their patch, and a brutal killer, Butcher Jack Bragg, to be tracked down and caught. It's one of Brock and Kolla's bloodiest investigations yet.
DI Kathy Kolla of Scotland Yard is called in as a matter of course by the local Paddington police when a woman turns up dead in what appears to be an accident. On her houseboat, Vicky Hawks is found by one of her neighbors having apparently succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning due to improper ventilation of the narrowboat’s heating system. But while the cause of death seems apparent and there’s no reason for Kolla to think otherwise, something about this death still bothers her.
Meanwhile, her boss, DCI Brock, is wrestling with harsh budget cuts and a new Commander who is determined to make fundamental changes to the system—including limiting resources devoted to investigations. Struggling against the limitations imposed by the new order at Scotland Yard, Brock and Kolla find themselves pulling at the loose strings in the death of Vicky Hawks, trying to find out who she really was, what she was up to, and how her death might be related to another earlier tragic accidental death.