Rating: 3/5
Review:
Rather ordinary
This started quite well, but in the end I got pretty tired
of it, I'm afraid. It's a fairly competently-written
police procedural set in Colchester in 1983, but neither
the plot nor the setting really did much for me.
We're introduced to DI Nick Lowry, who is clearly going to
have a series written about him. He's a
brilliant, fearless and inspiring but modest CID
man whose boss is a sexist, drunken dinosaur.
The plot revolves around drug smuggling and dodgy goings on at the local
army base…plus a load of stuff about Lowry's unfaithful, unreliable wife, the
romantic leanings (or otherwise) of Lowry's "team" – a fast-tracked,
highly educated DC and a WPC who just
happens to be an ex-model. (Yes, you
heard right – an ex-model.) I rather enjoyed
the first hundred pages or so, but the book goes on for the best part of 500
pages and it's just slow, unnecessarily convoluted and not quite convincing in
too many ways. I got to page 300 with a
sinking feeling that I still had 200 pages to wade through if I wanted to find
out what happened. A rigorous edit down
to 350 pages would have helped a lot.
It's not actively bad, but there's an awful lot of
unnecessary and tedious padding – three pages of wholly irrelevant description
of trivial events just so the dinosaur boss can find out a routine piece of
information, for example – and I began muttering "for God's sake get on
with it" to myself, and it goes on so much that I rather lost my grip on
the convoluted which involved dozens of names without much character attached. Even the main characters are somewhat
stereotyped and there's a good deal of stale cliché in the writing;
"..going nineteen to the dozen…",
"..he took it upon himself to…" and so on. Nothing frightful, but it's pretty ordinary stuff,
really, and I felt the same about the period, which didn’t quite permeate the
book as it should.
I can't say I'll be looking out for future Lowry books. This might make a decent brain-off beach read
but I can't really recommend it beyond that.
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