Rating: 1/5
Review:
Dreadfully bad
I'm afraid I thought One Man And His Bomb was dreadfully
poor. I have never much liked Keating's
Inspector Ghote series, but I thought I'd give this a try to see how he dealt
with a crime novel set in England. He doesn't deal with it well at all. It is clunky, implausible and, frankly, very
poorly written.
The plot revolves around Harriet Martens, a senior police
officer in "Birchester". She
learns in the first few pages that her twin sons have been caught in a bomb
attack in London; one has been
killed and one critically injured.
Nevertheless, the following day she takes sole responsibility for a
hugely important case in which an extremely dangerous experimental herbicide
which could devastate British agriculture has been stolen.
The book begins badly and never recovers. It opens with Harriet (Keating apparently
cannot decide whether her surname is Pinnick or Martens, by the way) and her
husband relaxing in the evening, with dialogue so stilted it is painful. For example, he jokingly refers to her as
"the Hard Detective," to which she responds, "I thought we had a
pact…you'd never mention that label they put on me back when I was in B
Division, stamping on petty crime."
This sort of ridiculously clumsy way of conveying her history to the
reader carries on throughout, and the dialogue is simply laughable. The whole plot is absurd: a herbicide which
has genes which can be manipulated? A
senior detective who fails to spot the most obviously concocted story (even if
it is concealed within a painfully stereotyped shifty Irishman)? And so on and so on.
It was so bad that I gave up in the end because I simply
couldn't bear any more. The set-up, the
plot and the writing were all miserably poor and I am amazed that an
experienced author like Keating would write something so amateurish. One to avoid.
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