A senior police officer is found with his head bashed in, lying on the floor of his study. DI Duncan Kincaid and DS Gemma James investigate whether or not the crime was related to the spate of burglaries that have been plaguing the village, the officer’s recent cases or something completely different. Let’s face it, anyone who’s read any crime fiction can probably guess which of the three options it’ll be…

This is the fourth in an ongoing (?) series of currently twelve books. The extra something here is the romantic attraction between Kincaid and James – you never got that with Morse and Lewis. All very tastefully done, mind you. Nothing lurid to see here.

You know, I can’t think of much to say about this one. (That’ll make a change – I hear you cry). There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with it. It’s well written, the characters are engaging enough and the story has enough twists and turns. Yes, it falls prey to the perennial series problem that a major personal life-lesson has to present itself at the start of the book and be resolved by the end of the book – in this case, Kincaid and James spent the night together, presumably in the previous book, and now she’s confused by what to do. A shame that it has to be the female character who’s indecisive, rather than the male one – might have been more interesting the other way round.

Solid. That’s the word for it. Solid and possibly a bit slow. Occasionally you find yourself asking how exactly Kincaid got promoted – for example, it takes him an age to trace a phone number found on the victim’s desk, and only then, he spots it by chance. Surely… phoning it would have been a bit quicker. Similarly, marks on the victim’s clothes are ignored when again, it’s reasonably obvious where they came from. Oh, and a lot of points of for a plot development in the second half of the book that seems important but goes exactly nowhere. In fact, it disappears into thin air (unless I dozed off – possible). And was it just me but was there at least one character who would have made a much more interesting murderer?

Anyway, enough babble. It’s perfectly acceptable and light-years ahead of some of the easy-reads that have passed my eyes in the last year, but there are better things out there if you’re after a mystery that would actually baffle a five year old. Might investigate another in the series at some point but there’s no rush…