James Oswald - Written In Bones

Rating: 3/5

Review:

A bit cliché-ridden and very implausible

I thought this was a fairly competent but rather uninspiring police procedural.  It is the seventh in a series which I hadn't come across before but it can be read as a stand-alone book.

It's a good opening: a body falls and is impaled on a large tree in Edinburgh, and it's unclear how or why he got there and even who the victim is.  A story then unfolds of murder, drug gangs, suspicions of police corruption and so on.  To me the whole thing felt a bit clunky and artificial, from the hostile senior officer to "the press are going to be all over this" and the inevitable Maverick Investigator with Complications In His Personal Life in DI Tony McLean.  There are also some pretty gaping plot holes (What was the significance of the samples on McLean's handkerchief?  Why were places turned over? etc. etc.)  At one point McLean is explaining things to his team and we're told, "The more McLean spoke it out loud, the more outlandish it sounded." And the climax (you've guessed it, a One-To-One confrontation with the True Arch-Villain) is simply ludicrous, I'm afraid.  (It would be too much of a spoiler to list all the absurdities, but I honestly said "Oh, for heavens' sake!" out loud several times.)

The writing is OK but there is some very clunky structure and dialogue; for example, people say "You know as well as I do…" an awful lot (on one occasion it happens twice in the same conversation, in the space of just a couple of paragraphs).  Hardly anyone says that in real life; it's just a clumsy device to get information to the reader by having one character tell another something they already know.  An experienced author should be able to do better – and there are a lot of other things about which I felt the same.  Stale usages like "his bundle of joy" and "the bowels of the earth," for example, crop up far too often and dreadful clichés like "they were as different as chalk and cheese" really won't do in any serious piece of writing.

I did finish the book because I wanted to know the answer to the mystery, but it was so unsatisfactory that in the end I wasn't sure I should have bothered.  Penguin are shortly to reissue the whole series but after I don't think I'll be reading the earlier ones, and I can't really recommend Written In Bones.