The Cyclist

“……[Detective Sergeant]……. Cross then appeared and organised his folder and pieces of paper equidistantly on the table.” And so begins the penultimate chapter in Tim Sullivan’s second police procedural. The scene is electric as the reader experiences the detective’s steely management of the closing interrogation of the prime suspect. Though the reader soon discovers in the final chapter, that there is more to be unravelled from the papers which Detective Cross placed on the table in his geometric manner.

The Bristol based Major Crimes Unit [MCU*] of Avon and Somerset Constabulary Team in their sophomore outing, are starting to coalesce inside the readers mind. At its head is the politically motivated DCI Carson, now forcing DS Josie Otley to remain partnered to DS George Cross. Despite Cross’s odd manner, a symptom of the notch on his neuro-divergent sleeve, he gets results. His relationship with Ottey goes beyond the professional, as his partner completes the emotional voids he carries. This includes his communication[s] with fellow colleagues like the trainee Alice Mackenzie who he is tasked to manage; as well as smoothing issues with his own father, the retired engineer Raymond.

This time, the MCU are investigating the murder of a cyclist, Alexander Paphides. The amateur sportsman’s body is found wrapped in industrial polyethylene and dumped in a building site, where a series of abandoned ‘lock-up’ garages are being demolished. The pathologist determines cause of death to be a violent head injury [aka blunt-edged trauma].

The investigation becomes a complex serious of concurrent enquiries which have to be investigated in-parallel. It seems that the murdered cyclist was part-owner of a local family restaurant The Adelphi Palace. His passion was competitive amateur cycling, and so he may have dabbled in performance enhancing pharmaceuticals. There are shady members of the cycle club, unsavoury body-builder types, his own brother Kostas, his young girlfriend Debbie and the dysfunctional Swinton family, local business suppliers [to The Adelphi Palace] as well as criminals from Greece, and that old motivational chestnut - debts – all competing as possible angles into why Alex Paphides was murdered. There’s even surveillance by MI5, perplexing DCI Carson’s political sensitivities, as it appears British Intelligence may have insight into a person-of-interest within DS George Cross’s investigation.

At the novel’s midpoint, I was feeling overwhelmed by the myriad [and at times overlapping] branches of the MCU investigation. I felt that the author had not plotted The Cyclist, but was exploring the characters as he wrote the narrative. In parallel, his detective was investigating all these leads; questioning the antagonists, side-characters and random people plucked from the streets of Bristol – until, the eureka moment – when the author had the solution to the murder, which [in this readers mind] was coincidentally at the exact same moment that it crystallised in his detective, DS George Cross’s thoughts. It was when Cross was playing his beloved church organ, allowing the timbre of the musical notes to calm his thoughts in order for them to solidify into a resolution.

Though, like the old ‘one-two’ [in boxing vernacular], or the ‘double-tap’ [in assassination terminology] – there comes a further revelation that made me put the book down in genuine surprise. I felt the air from my lungs whistle out as my mind contemplated all the events that occurred during the three days I had this book in my hands and within my head.

The Cyclist like the preceding novel, The Dentist, provided both a hypnotic and totally complete distraction from reality, an exploration of moral dilemma, as well as a mechanism for deep contemplation of the people who appear around us, and what may lurk in their complicated lives.

Onward to the third novel in the series, The Patient.

*Side Note: I find amusement in the acronym used for the Major Crimes Unit “MCU” within these DS George Cross mysteries - as each time the author uses “MCU”, I think of the characters contained in the Marvel Comics Universe, which shares that acronym.