Mark Hill - The Two O'Clock Boy

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Very disappointing

I'm afraid I can't agree with the enthusiastic reviews for The Two O'Clock Boy.  I didn't think it was very good at all.

The book is a sort of police procedural, in that it involves a police investigation of a series of murders, but there's precious little procedure really, and lots of Maverick Cop, This-Time-It's-Personal, Threatened Investigator stuff.  Both central police officers have Family Issues, one has a Dark Secret In His Past Which Could Ruin Him…you get the idea.  The plot – who would have thought it? – centres around an abusive children's home in the 1980s, and frankly, it all felt rather unoriginal and well-worn.

The narrative is quite well structured at the start so I found myself carried along reasonably well for the first couple of hundred pages.  However, lazy cliché marred the prose too often: "he clung on for dear life", "she dragged them kicking and screaming", "the life and soul" and plenty of others, and the occasional solecism added to the sense of slightly careless writing.  It all seemed a bit stale and crudely done to me; I found that the story became more laboured and the implausibilities and rather unconvincing "thrills" mounted up.  Characters who had earlier been carefully introduced and given rather pointless little conflicts of their own which added nothing to the story were apparently forgotten.  I lost count of the number of times a phone rang or something else interrupted *just* as something dreadful was about to happen…and so on. 

The book became a bit of a slog, and then just silly – including a vicious mass murderer who said things like "I harbour a lifetime's resentment against your family," at which point I said out loud "oh, for heavens' sake!" (I paraphrase).  I got to the eye-rolling stage as the lead investigator was taken off the case, wondering whether any cliché was to be left out, and passed well beyond it as the plot and behaviour of central characters became simply ridiculous.  I finished the book out of a sense of duty and then wondered why I had bothered with what became simply ludicrous nonsense. 

So, this wasn't for me.  The reasonably good first half meant I gave it two stars rather than one, but only just.  This is the start of a series, apparently, but it's certainly not a series I shall be bothering with.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)