Saturday Slaughters

 So the SS group had its last meeting before the summer break on Saturday and, fingers crossed on lots of people, it was also the last meeting by Skype. Personally, as I may have said before, I prefer the Skype to the real thing since it is less bother and more comfortable, but I do get that lots of people prefer to meet in person.

The book was The Dentist by Tim Sullivan, who has a successful career apparently, as a scriptwriter for film and TV and this was his first foray into fiction. It was self published which in  an established writer in other genres was a bit of a red flag but nonetheless I approahed it with an open mind. I think. 

And I found it incredibly frustrating. There were the makings of a really good book in there. The plot was strong, there was a bit of a wist, you couldn't tell whodunit, and there wee some good and even some likeable characters, in it. 

And that's the good news. 

The bad news is twofold. Firstly, although Sullivan thanked both an editor and a proof reader in his acknowledgements  neither had done their job particularly well. Bits of the book were very very repetitive. There were numerous grammatical errors, the most common of which was changing tenses between two clauses in a sentence. And presumably if either the editor or the proof reader had been on the ball they would have noticed that a character first introduced as Daniel became Alan several pages later and stayed Alan throughout the rest of the book. 

Secondly, I've commented before on how people starting to write police procedurals these days have to have detectives with a 'thing'. Sullivan's detective, George Cross  (and yes, really!) suffers from Asperger's syndrone. This is established by overly long and constant descriptions of behaviours plus many many reminders of his inability to pick up on other peoples body language, or to feel empathy with anyone. A prime example of the horrors of tell, not show. Also Sullivan painted himself into a corner (wrote himself into a corner?) because to make George bearable to the reader he had occasionally to give him sympathetic or empathetic feelings towards others. I think it is probably impossible to write an accurate  central fictional character with Asperger's and make them someone the reader likes: I could be wrong, but even if I am  Sullivan is not the man for the job. 

There is a second book in what is obviously planned to be a series, and it would be interesting to see whether and/or by how much the Asperger's aspect of Cross gets watered down. I suspect the condition  may end up being simply a series of more or less irritating behavioural tics, but who knows?