At Death's Window

Fiction - Crime

Score: 8/10

I have been a big fan of Jim Kelly ever since he debuted with the "Water Clock" and his character Phil Dryden.  Now we have the spin off characters, Shaw and Valentine, who are growing well on me too.  I like them because they are just two good old English police detectives solving crimes in mostly the good old fashioned way, walking the streets, talking to people and following leads.  This storyline was quite different - second homes being vandalised and samphire fishermen turning up murdered - but you know that Shaw and Valentine are up to the task of finding the perpetrators and solving the crime.  You are always guaranteed a great read with Kelly and this one did not disappoint.

I have been meaning to read some of Jim Kelly's crime novels for a long time and I'm glad I finally got around to reading one as this is excellent.  The background is North Norfolk around Kings Lynn and this at times desolate area of the country adds an atmospheric background to this well plotted crime novel featuring Peter Shaw and George Valentine. 

A body is found on the coast, there is a spate of second home burglaries which may or may not have a political aspect and there is a supply of illegal drugs which has been mixed with another even more harmful drug which is causing serious injuries and death. Are these crimes related and what about the vandal who keeps shooting stained glass angels? Shaw is battling a Chief Constable who just wants to lie low until he retires with a knighthood and Valentine misses his dead wife.

With excursions into glass making and stained glass and some interesting information about lightening striking sand this is a well written crime novel set in an area I have visited on several occasions so it had added interest for me.  The book is part of a series and I think I possibly missed out by not having read the previous novels in this series though it is possible to read it as a standalone story.  I shall now be going back and reading this author's other novels.  I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review purposes.
This review is live on Amazon now and on Goodreads.  It will go live on my blog on November 11th

This is a good, if rather procedural, crime novel with a lot to offer the mystery/crime lover. First of all, this book does not have the conventional, boring background of a standard crime novel. The author took great care to create a main character that is quirky, has his own life outside of his job and other people he is connected to. I liked that it wasn't all about the job in this book.

The crimes themselves are intriguing and different than I have seen in other books. There is danger, excitement and a good overall cast of characters that bring life to these pages.

I did get lost a few times in the more technical and procedural aspects of this book. The author is very convincing, but there were a few times when I thought it was a bit much description for the average reader.

There is more than one story line going on in this book, so that also made it interesting and they were easy to follow so there was no confusion between the characters or events.

I liked this book. The author has a clear, controlled way of writing that made me keep comfortably turning pages long into the night. Recommended.

This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher and provided through Netgalley. All opinions are my own.

This book was really an unusual police procedural novel and that made it more interesting to read than novels written to a formula. There is positively no formula for this one. To begin with, the two main characters, DI Peter Shaw - head of the CID unit - and DS George Valentine, don't consider themselves friends. I find this to be a rather unusual pairing because of that very fact. Valentine was teamed up with Shaw's father so the two have known each other for over thirty years and have worked together for six, but they are not presented to the reader as friends. Friendly and amiable, yes, also relying on each other to use their individual strengths to work on specific aspects of a case. Another different aspect is that the author allows both policemen to go off on their own to investigate with their own style, they aren't joined at the hip twenty-four hours a day. Also interesting is that there are multiple major crimes being worked by this force centered at King's Lynn in north Norfolk. While Shaw and Valentine may be instrumental in helping solve the cases they are not the principal officers working those cases. A very nice example of delegation of work and the author makes it very effective and provides a touch of realism I've not often seen in fictional crime stories.

The problem in this quiet area of the Norfolk coast is that an outsider in the form of a criminal boss has discovered there is money to be made by taking over the harvesting of samphire for sale to gourmet restaurants and markets throughout England. If the traditional samphire harvesters want to hold on to their time-honored areas to harvest, they are going to have to fight the thugs trying to take over. One act of mischief leads to something more serious until the escalation has reached the point of murder.

I liked reading a novel that kept me guessing because it was constructed in a different way. I knew from references I was reading of past happenings that there had been previous novels in the series but this was a perfectly easy to read stand-alone book. I liked the humor shown by the author too. Lines like, "His teeth were so good he could have been American." surprised and delighted me. For a totally land-locked person such as me, all the talk of the tides and different consequences of high tide and low tide was somewhat like trying to decipher a foreign language, but still a fun challenge. I certainly did not guess how the major homicide had taken place.

I received an ARC of this novel through NetGalley.

A review of 'At Death's Window' has been posted at www.crimebookbeat.com.

I loved this new book in the series.  Very atmospheric, with great descriptions of Norfolk

This series improves with each new book.  Clever plots supported by interesting characters and atmospheric settings.