Rating: 3/5
Review:
Disappointing
I didn’t enjoy Dover One nearly as much as I’d hoped. Farrago
have done an excellent job in finding and reissuing some really good
humorous series – notably Colin Watson’s Flaxborough books, the
Bandy series by Donald Jack and Miss Seeton; sadly, for me this
wasn’t nearly as enjoyable.
Written and set in
the mid 60s, the book features the eponymous Chief Inspector Dover
who is idle, unscrupulous and offensive in both manner and person.
He and his super-keen and squeaky-clean sidekick are called to
investigate the disappearance of a young woman in “Creedshire”
where we meet, Agatha Christie style, a cast of locals who may all
have had a motive for doing away with her, but her (very substantial)
body is nowhere to be found.
The mystery is
decently plotted and well written but I’m afraid I became pretty
tired of it all by about half way and began to skim. I still can’t
quite put my finger on why, but it’s partly that the characters are
a collection of almost uniformly repellent caricatures which I found
rather heavy-handed rather than witty. Things do move pretty slowly,
so in the absence of an engaging character or of much to make me
smile I got quite bogged down. Also, even allowing for the
prevailing attitudes of the time, I found some of it pretty jarring
and using the hideous suffering survived by one character in a
concentration camp as a humorous (even darkly humorous) plot device
really did seem a bit much.
It may just be me;
the prose is well written and it’s well plotted, so others may
enjoy Dover far more than I did, but personally I can’t really
recommend it.
(My thanks to
Farrago for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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