First off let me state for the record that I'm not a crime novel fan. I know it's a hugely popular genre and I used to read my fair share when Grisham and Sandford were churning them out like battery hens, but I guess after a few variants on the same story I wandered off to pastures new. (Or in my case, old, since I wandered back to fantasy which is a prime culprit in the variants on the same story thing. But I digress.)
As a novice writer, I am trying to read out of my comfort zone a little, to see how the plots are constructed, how the pacing is used, and so on, so that I can learn to do it too. Hence my brief foray into the world of the private detective.
Here we have a private detective (Leo Rivers) hired by a man whose daughter was named as part of a paedophile ring five years before. The only man convicted is about to launch an appeal, and the father wants the case on the several girls who were linked to the ring but who Roper, the photographer convicted, was not tried for to be reinvestigated. The father believes there was malpractice on the part of the man leading the investigation and he wants his daughter's body to be found.
There are more sides to the story than that, of course. As well as the father, we have bent cops, apparently-good-but-we're-never-entirely-sure cops, bent prison officers, friendly-but-are-they-really journalists and a love interest who can't seem to make up her mind whether she's after the 'tec or the journalist.
All this is set around Hull, which is something of a novelty. I'm used to crime novels being set in San Francisco or Los Angeles - London at a pinch - but certainly not Hull. You certainly get a feel of the grey, grimyness that the author sets out to convey, and it gives a good backdrop to the tale of exploitation and murder that unfolds. But much as I imagine nothing much happening in Hull, unfortunately that feeling continued as I read.
Oh things *happen* all right. We have the interweaving threads of the girls who were involved with the ring and the policemen who were investigating it and that's all fine and dandy. The plot, in essence, works. The twist is telegraphed a mile out, but that's another matter. What I struggled with was pacing.
Love them or hate them, Sandford and Grisham know about pacing. They will pull you along, making you turn the pages faster and faster and then they will give you that "phew" couple of chapters where your heart rate comes back down, your fingers get a chance to recover from the paper cuts and you finally feel able to go and make that cup of tea you've been craving for the past hour. Edric's book pretty much chugs along at a single pace. The only moments of tension I remember were a beating up scene (a couple of paragraphs, and wasted really - I got no real sense of menace from it) and a section where the computer experts (two wisecracking women, how very modern of him) are trying to break into the hidden files on a computer that the head cop has conveniently kept in his house all this time. They try and...they manage it. OK, so not much tension there then, ho hum.
I'm probably being a little unfair here, after all this isn't my genre and crime lovers would probably feel the same faced with a fantasy novel. The writing is sound, the characterisation is OK and as I've said the plot works. This guy has been touted as the British Stieg Larsson and this book is the first of a trilogy (well, whaddyaknow?). I quite liked the first Stieg Larsson book, disliked the second and gave up on the third in disgust as I just plain didn't care. On that basis, I shan't risk the second and third of this series - better cut while I'm (more or less) in front.
Would have been a 2/5 but I'm giving it a 3, just in case I'm being unduly unfair since it's not a genre I'd normally read. It has a fistful of 5 star reviews on Amazon, though, so maybe crime afficionados like it.
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