Alison Bruce - Cambridge Blue

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Could have been much better

In spite of some good things about this book, I found it rather hard going. It has a decent plot (although I found the denouement very muddled) and at times Alison Bruce writes very well - I thought the post-mortem scene was excellently done, for example - and she generates a good sense of Cambridge, but stilted language too often made both narrative and dialogue feel rather forced to me.

My biggest problem with the book, though, was that I found the character of the main protagonist, DC Gary Goodhew, increasingly implausible. I suspect that Ms Bruce is more than half in love with her creation - she makes him attractive but unaware of it, fabulously empathetic and non-sexist, far more intelligent and intuitive than any of his colleagues, and so bursting with integrity and the desire to do good that it's a wonder it doesn't give him a nose bleed. He even has cool taste in music. And just in case we haven't grasped the point, we get an anti-Gary against whom he can shine; a colleague who is vain, arrogant, bigoted, faithless, careless...and so on.

The author's infatuation with her creation means that he is allowed to get away with frankly ridiculous behaviour. He constantly acts unprofessionally and sometimes illegally, but (of course) unearths vital clues which skilled and experienced teams of experts have missed. His DI takes him off the case (of course), but within a couple of hours he is reinstated and, although he is exceptionally young and totally inexperienced, the same DI immediately entrusts him with conducting the interviews with the prime suspects in a high-profile murder case on his own. There's rather a lot of this sort of thing and I'm afraid I ended up finding it absurd, irritating and very distracting.

I didn't think this was a terrible book by any means, but it could have been far, far better. Alison Bruce is obviously setting Gary Goodhew up for a series of novels; if she sticks to writing in the unaffected style of the best parts of this book, cuts out the clichés of the genre and brings rather more discipline to her treatment of her characters the novels could turn out to be rather good, but I'm afraid I can only give this one a lukewarm recommendation.