Walking into the Ocean: A Peter Cammon Mystery, Book 1

An interesting plot, and not badly written – but I have serious doubts if the author has ever visited Britain as there are so many things wrong with the cultural references. No English housewife (the detective’s in this case) would call curtains “drapes”, the police do not employ semi-retired police detectives to handle important murder cases on a part-time basis, there are no local TV-station “affiliates” of national networks, people drink beer in pubs and not ale, a forensic blood stain expert is not a haematologist, and so on; there are many more like these. Small things, but they pile up, are unnecessary and almost bad enough to make me stop listening … I only carried on because I wanted to know “who did it”. Other irritants – nobody can tell menstrual blood stains on a wall from any other sort of blood just by looking at it, the hierarchy in the Metropolitan police (not Scotland yard – that’s just a building) is not full of Lords and Sirs and the faux-North American accent given by the reader to the Canadian character is decidedly not a Canadian accent. All very sloppy and needless when a bit of decent editing would have fixed these things.

Got his facts right about life and policing in Britain

Adequate

Not read anything more by this author

The novel features yet another lead detective who's supposed to be deep and interesting, yet comes across as just the opposite: both dim and dull, except when he jumps to conclusions for no apparent reason. Further, the novel suffers from truly tedious back stories that lend nothing to the plot. Otherwise, the story is moderately interesting--enough to get one through a work-out at the gym--but that's about it.