Mark Douglas-Home - The Sea Detective

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Promising but flawed

I thought this was a very good idea which was reasonably well done.  I would like to have given this four stars because there's promise here, but it did have some pretty serious flaws and in the end I couldn't, I'm afraid.

This is a crime novel with both police and private detective elements.  Cal McGill is a rather geeky (but apparently rather sexy) marine expert who can track beached objects back to their source at sea.  He is slightly clumsily introduced, as is the police officer Helen Jamieson, a bright, capable officer whose colleagues despise her because she is plain and a bit overweight.  Three stories intertwine: two criminal and one personal to Cal who is struggling to right an ancient injustice done to his grandfather.

It's not bad.  Mark Douglas-Home writes decent prose and I became quite interested in a couple of the characters and in the development of the stories.  However, it lacks the discipline and structure to work really well.  Plot details don't quite hang together sometimes; for example, a very nasty, painful rib injury and a sprained ankle suddenly vanish and are never heard of again.  The book sometimes meanders and lacks focus, with the story flagging badly in places and could have done with some pretty firm tightening up.  The stories are told from too many different viewpoints which breaks the narrative up badly, and although they are all decent stories in a way, their respective denouements all seemed very pat and convenient to me, with the sudden, convenient intervention of hitherto unmentioned people or evidence.  And the finale, intended to be a nail-biting showdown climax, just became plain silly, I'm afraid.

Douglas-Home tackles important themes here.  It's a fine idea to make Helen a bit physically unattractive, for example, and to examine the way in which people respond to her as a result.  However, it does need to be done with a little subtlety and realism to be believable, and the creation of a bad-guy boss for her who is vain, libidinous, incompetent and vindictive to the point of being ludicrously pantomimic weakens rather than strengthens the point being made.  If he had a moustache, he would unquestionably twirl it, and much the same can be said about other villains in the book.   It really is like a children's story in which all the horrid nasty people are eventually thwarted by the ingenuity of the nice, virtuous underdogs, which undermined its credibility for me.

So, this is a decent but flawed first book in what may turn out to be a good series.  There's enough promise to encourage me to try the next one but this comes with a rather qualified recommendation.

(I received a free ARC via Netgalley.)