|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
Martin Edwards has written a series starring Harry Devlin, a somewhat down-at-the-heels Liverpool lawyer with a penchant for solving crimes. Here, like his new hero, Daniel Kind, an ex-Oxford history don and minor TV personality, Edwards forsakes Liverpool's mean streets for the Lake District, where he hopes, one supposes, to find inner peace or what may pass for it when at the mercy of builders. Daniel and his girlfriend, Miranda, a magazine journalist, have sold up and moved to Tarn Cottage, former home of the autistic Barrie Gilpin, generally believed to have been responsible for the death, seven years earlier, of a beautiful woman whose corpse was found laid out on the Sacrifice Stone up on the fell. Barrie himself fell to his death, perhaps accidentally, before he could so much as be questioned. Dan knew Barrie for a couple of weeks when they were children; this brief friendship is enough to cause him to ask awkward questions around the village, questions which ultimately lead to a reopening of the old case. Edwards is an engaging writer, one who is more interested here in Dan's past and his own particular demons than in the crime, though unravelling that provides a sufficient number of surprises. The main problem I had with the book was with the two protagonists, Dan and Miranda, who seemed a little too lightweight and not a little flaky to fully involve me in the outcome. I had difficulty taking Daniel altogether seriously because he threw over an Oxbridge career of considerable promise for a back-to-simplicity life in the Lakes, complete with Aga, apparently because his girlfriend of a few weeks thought it might be nice. Likewise, the fundamental premise, that Kind would be motivated to clear Barrie's name because he'd known and liked him for a few weeks when he was a boy struck me as laboured. I very much liked Harry Devlin and was a bit slow to warm up to Dan Kind, one of Nature's blunderers, despite his intellectual credentials. Still, Edwards does the city interloper into village life theme very well indeed. I'd recommend this for its setting, intelligence, and general competence .
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2004
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
| 
