Rating: 4/5
Review:
Enjoyable nonsense
In the end I enjoyed this book. It certainly isn't full of gritty realism and the plot creaks pretty badly, but it's decently written and quite fun.
James Craig has created a new detective, Inspector Carlyle of the Met. I found him a reasonably engaging character, refreshingly unburdened by the traditional Complicated Personal Life, Problems With Authority, Addictive Personality and so on, and I also liked the amiable and straightforward relationship he has with his sergeant. The prose is competent and pacy as one would expect from a former journalist, and the book is easy to read with necessary back-story in the form of inserts into the main narrative, which some readers found distracting or confusing but which for me worked well.
The plot and characters are both pretty silly, to be honest, but there is amusing banter, cynical remarks and just sufficient excitement to keep me reading and enjoying it. Craig uses the book to take sideswipes at some stereotypes of privileged politicians with no ability but plenty of spin and a colossal sense of entitlement. We also get the slimy, careerist senior officer, the bimbo TV journalist, the brutal and moronic police constable and so on. They are all so grotesque and absurdly caricatured as to be beyond satire, but it's light, amusing stuff, and if you're prepared to suspend disbelief from a very great height and don't mind a rather rickety plot and some pretty graphic and unpleasant descriptions of sex acts, this is an enjoyable, if disposable, read.
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