Danielle Ramsay - Broken Silence

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Promising but flawed

There is a lot to enjoy in this book but I think Danielle Ramsay has tried just a bit too hard to make an impression with her first Jack Brady novel, so that it suffers rather from overkill both in plot and prose style.

Good things first: it's a very decent story, well plotted and paced. I thought the killer's identity was well and quite fairly concealed until late in the book and the denouement was believable and well done. It is much to Ramsay's credit that she spares us an implausible Cornered Killer Climax; the interview scenes in which the truth finally emerges are among the strongest in the book and provide a gripping climax of their own. I certainly think that there's enough substance here to warrant a second book and possibly a series.

I do have reservations, though. Firstly, in her keenness to give us an interesting detective, Ramsay lays on the personal complications with a large trowel. As well as having a monumentally complex and dysfunctional personal life, Jack Brady seems to be emotionally or professionally compromised (sometimes both) in his relationship with almost everyone involved in the case: a major suspect, the suspect's wife and daughter, the defence solicitor (his recently ex-wife, for heaven's sake), his sidekick, his boss, an arrogant sergeant, the local mafia boss... and so on and on. It really did get a bit much and I began to wonder whether a character would ever appear with whom he hadn't slept or fought or shared a shady past.

Secondly, the style (he coolly introduced). Ramsay cannot just let characters speak for themselves (he briskly stated) but has to pile on the adverbs (he firmly asserted) and clumsy synonyms for "said" (he curtly attacked). After 100 pages or so I found the cumulative effect of this incredibly irritating and it really distracted me from the narrative. Mercifully, in the climactic interview scenes this almost disappears and they are tense, tightly written and really engrossing, showing that Ramsay is able to write really well when she allows herself to flow in an unaffected way.

I think Danielle Ramsay just needs to relax and tell the story, and I hope she will do that in future books. I couldn't in all conscience give this book four stars, but I hope it will be the start of a more mature series, which has the potential to be very good.