Two Disappointing Recent Reads

 

I have previously reported here on how, much to my surprise, I became a fan of Val MacDermid's Tony Hill and Carol Jordan books, so I was pleased to find this, How the Dead Speak  in a bookshop recently  although I forget where and when I bought it. It's the last Jordan and Hill story and I was looking forward to reading it and seeing how things got tied up. The answer was, in an unlikely, sentimental, but sketchy  bouquet roughly held together with second hand string. Rather than celebrating her great achievement with this series, and giving it a fitting end, it seemed, to me at least, that MacDermid had just got bored with the characters, the back stories, and the whole set up, and just wanted to draw a line underneath the   project as quickly as she could. There were too many plotlines, rather as though  she couldn't be bothered to flesh one central one out properly so decided instead to jumble three together to make the length of the book: and unresolved, and sometimes seemingly unresolvable relationships, were suddenly given easy, and happy endings. To be honest, I think I would rather have had the characters left in the limbo from the end of the previous book than read this one. 

The other one was an Audible one. It was called A Killing in November by someone called Simon Mason. I had never heard of this, it's no 1 in an on-going series of police procedurals set in Oxford, and I wouldn't have known anything about it had it not been recommended by an author I much admire in the columns of The Guardian. It had much to admire; an original-ish story, expertly plotted, some interesting characters, a very well scripted sense of place .... the problem was with one of the two main police protagonists, since the person concerned would never have got near to being recruited by any police force in the country. Uncontrolled, foul mouthed, tactless  and with a violent temper and perfectly balanced in that he has  a huge chip on each shoulder. I see from reviews on Audible that I am not alone in finding this preposterous excuse for a police character a huge stumbling block to the enjoyment of the book. It's a shame because I'd really like to find a good new police procedural series to read, but if there is such a thing out there, this is not it.