Caroline Crowley died when falling down some stairs in a mall. She tripped on a broken step, fell down and impaled herself on some rebar. An accident, but Edison Bixby is hired to establish if the mall owners were responsible.

But Edison Bixby is not basic insurance investigator. A brilliant detective, but after being shot in the face, he has no filter and is impulsively rude. Hence his new assistant, Wally Nash, a failed actor.

But back to the mall – despite there being nobody anywhere near her, Bixby is convinced that Crowley was murdered. But with nobody else believing his outrageous theory, it’s going to be difficult to stop the killer from striking again.

Like I said in my last review, I don’t have any reviews scheduled for this month so I can dip into my TBR pile. And then my Amazon First Reads came up with this by Lee Goldberg so I decided to read this instead.

Lee Goldberg has a long history of writing crime, initially for television for shows such as Diagnosis: Murder, Nero Wolfe, Monk and, um, She-Wolf Of London (which is exactly what it sounds like). He’s also written a lot of murder mysteries – some based on Diagnosis: Murder and Monk – and a number of other original series. Murder By Design is the first in a new series featuring Edison Bixby. And… it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

I’ve only read Goldberg’s Monk books before now and structurally (bar the final section that I’ll dance around spoilers for in a bit) it seems quite similar. We have a few little cases and the main one, one where we are pretty sure who the murderer is and it’s just  a question of who. But Bixby isn’t Monk – he even says that at one point – and that’s kind of the problem. Monk has his problems but you empathise with him. Bixby… well, he wasn’t the cuddliest individual before he had his mishap – he was, after all, shot in the face by someone he had p@ssed off by solving their perfect murder in five seconds flat.

I like the idea of structures lending themselves to help facilitate murderous plans which seems to be Bixby’s big theory about almost every murder he comes across, but what I don’t like much is Bixby himself. His flaw of speaking his mind never really affects anything – Wally apologises and it’s just played primarily for laughs. And without that flaw, then Bixby is presented as near perfect. And I suppose that’s the idea, that we root for Wally, but he’s a bit of a twit as well. And the female characters really don’t come across well, mostly being presented for the leads to drool over or, well, shag. Two of them walk around with too few clothes on without any concern who they bump into – I think this is a deliberate injection of unreality, but it didn’t seem necessary to me.

However, I should say that the final section of the book goes some way to redeeming things in more ways than one. The motive of one important character seemed a bit weak, and I did wonder what would have happened if the “accident” hadn’t been fatal… It’s a wonderfully complex-but-simple method but it seems much more likely to go wrong than go right.

At the end of the day, the overall plot is rather clever and by the end of the book, as Wally accepts his new role, he had grown on me. But I hope that in the next book (due next year) we see more cracks in Bixby’s near-perfect life. I think there’s a fair bit of potential here, especially with Goldberg’s plotting skills – let’s see where he goes with it.

I received a copy of Murder By Design via the Amazon First Reads program. It is released properly n June 1^st this year.