I do love a good police thriller and let’s be honest, there are lots of them out there so when my mum recommended this to me, I was skeptical about whether it would take me anywhere that I hadn’t been before in terms of my police detective reading experience.
I was pleasantly surprised.
This is not the first book in the series which follows the police investigations of D.C.I. Jack Logan. It is probably the wrong place to start with our character-reader relationship as I’m meeting him in the most recent novel where mention is made of past experiences and investigations. In this book, they’re affecting Jack quite a lot, him not actually being on active duty at the start. The reasons are alluded to throughout but not explicitly explained, meaning that there are no spoilers that would mar the reading of previous books and I didn’t feel like I was out of the loop context-wise or lost at any point.
Here, Jack is “advising” on the murder case of one of his idols, a rock star called Johnny Freestone, Jack having been lured back into the fold by his boss over a coffee, much against his better instincts. But it would appear that old (police) habits die hard and the hunt for a killer is something that Jack finds difficult to resist, even if fear is trying to temper his drive every step of the way.
The plot twists and turns its way through clues and towards potential suspects (and then away again) and it is all very entertaining. And I mean that in every sense of the word because this is not just a good police story with the usual tensions and red herrings to keep you hooked and guessing. No, this is full of humour and I mean, laugh out loud moments and it’s in the dialogue where the humour lies and in the well-conceived relationships between Logan and his team and in Kirk’s depiction of the man brought in to potentially permanently replace Logan if he can’t sort his shit out, the skeletal and seemingly inept DCI McCulloch.
It all leads to a satisfying conclusion which I raced to, leaving me with a need for more. The next book that I read will be the first one, again courtesy of my mother, and we’ll lead on from there – A Rock and a Hard Place was book 21!
Can’t recommend enough.
Rachel Rating:
Scuffed Granny 