Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
The discovery of a body with the teeth and fingerprints removed under a bridge is the starting point for a challenging case for DCI Warren Jones and his team. A lonely man estranged from his family the victim lived beyond his means and may have been involved in a major crime. Uncovering how he met his end will lead them into a maze of blackmail, family conflicts and betrayed trust.
I hadn’t encountered either Paul Gitsham or his series character Warren Jones before being sent this book to review. That, I now know, meant there was a serious deficit in my reading life.
This is a solidly crafted and entirely satisfying police procedural, a sub-genre that deserves more admiration than it often receives because it is so fiendishly hard to get right. On that score Gitsham has hit every target squarely in the bullseye.
He writes about the painstaking and seldom glamorous business of investigating serious crime in a way that is believable, yet still engaging to read about. His police officers are ordinary men and women going about a job that sometimes ties them up in red-tape, and every so often requires them to encounter without looking away the darkest aspects of human nature.
His criminals are equally believable, their actions motivated by a mixture of greed, fear, and lack of foresight. In this book these culminate in a crime that is ultimately as futile as it is brutal.
This is a solid and engaging crime novel from a writer with the potential to be one of the big names on the British scene. If, like me, you weren’t familiar with Paul Gitsham before, now might be a good time to check out his back catalogue.
