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There's a very neat idea at the centre of DEATH WORE WHITE which seems what's in effect a locked room murder transported to the great outdoors – this time the snowy Fens of England. At 5.15pm Harvey Ellis was alive in his van at the head of a line of eight cars stranded down a remote Norfolk coast road in a blizzard. Three hours later he was dead – stabbed at the wheel of his vehicle. Except no one saw the killer, who escaped without leaving a footprint in the snow. This is a new series for Jim Kelly, whose previous one featuring reporter Philip Dryden was consistently top of my 'must read' list. This time he introduces us to DI Peter Shaw and his reluctant sidekick DS George Valentine. In comparison with the previous series, it feels thin. Kelly's shown how good he is at cameos (I still remember fondly Humph the taxi driver, Gary the gormless reporter and the eccentric Scottish photographer from the Dryden books), but that doesn't come across here – the supporting cast are very wispy. And there's almost none of the dry wit and sharp one-liners that made that previous series such a delight. The problem, too, is that Shaw actually isn't that interesting a character either. He made a brief appearance in THE SKELETON MAN, the previous Dryden book, but he's as under-developed in his own show as he was then. He's a surfer, he's in a mixed race marriage that his family don't approve of, he's somewhat of a maverick – and he's determined to solve a cold case relating to his father. Except that's not terribly engrossing either and just serves to slow down an otherwise perfectly serviceable plot. What pretty much sunk the book for me, though, was the straying point of view. I'd noticed it occasionally in the previous series, but Dryden was a strong enough character for it not to matter. Here, Kelly flits gaily between characters' heads in the course of paragraphs, so you're constantly unsettled by never knowing who the main focus is and by having to double-check who's talking or thinking. I kept reading because I genuinely wanted to know whodunit, and because I love the way Kelly can portray his part of England so vividly. He's too good a writer to give up on, but I filed this one under 'hugely disappointing.'
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, April 2009
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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