The Body in the Snow

DCI Craig Gillard, Book 4

By: Nick Louth

Narrated by: Marston York

Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

Money, success, family? All deadly....

The gripping new DCI Gillard thriller. Perfect for readers of D. K. Hood, Patricia Gibney and Mark Billingham, The Body in the Snow is a remarkable and gripping crime thriller.

A young detective is out for a jog on a snowy winter morning. Then she sees something terrible: a murder in the park, sudden and inexplicable. A woman has been killed by a passing hooded cyclist. It’s just DCI Craig Gillard’s luck that he’s on duty. The body is that of Tanvi Roy, one of the richest women in Britain and matriarch of a food empire.

With a tangled web of family and business contacts and jealousies, Gillard’s job just got even more complex. As he delves deeper into the Roy family, it’s clear that everything is not as it seems. As the investigation threatens to unravel, Gillard realises it's only the beginning of his problems. Trouble of a different sort is brewing close to home.

©2019 Nick Louth (P)2020 W. F. Howes Ltd

Such a shame. we are back to book one .

When the end of your plot requires so much explanation
There is something wrong. Again, three hours too long. Book two was so much better.

Series Gets Even Better

Loved the plot and range of characters. Hope that our hero learns to spend more time with his spouse. He's really risking his marriage. How is the series getting better? Wicked humor cuts through some very tragic happenings. Writing shows sophisticated understanding of power dynamics in family businesses. The plot was precariously balanced between action, suspense, false leads, and good detective work. The book was not longer than it needed to be. The author quickly and neatly summed up the solutions, court outcomes, and relationship consequences. There are loose ends: suspicious characters lurk on the edges of the ending, and at least one plot line left this reader wondering if there is a false narrator in the police unit, plotting to mess up Craig. we shall see. Great narration as usual.

Excellent Series

Another good one in the series. Will look forward for book 5. The Narrator also does a great job in capturing the tone and emotions of the characters.

Fantastic !

This is a superbly written book in a great series. Books 2 and 3 in the series are not quite as good, but Nick Louth more than makes up with is one. The story is great and keeps one on edge to the very end. The performance by the reader is really good with plenty of inflection in his voice.

Overall a really good book !!!!

Needs a turn around for our protagonist

Loved the first two books. However, in the last two the author is trying hard to humanize Craig and Sam and it isn’t working. They have taken a turn from relatable to unlikeable. If their development continues down hill I’ll be moving on to another series. Having said all that; the writing is very good. Just give these two characters a break.

Fast becoming one of my favorite authors

And Marston York is one of my favorite readers. He can handle a variety of accents...in one instance a mix of Persian, Afghani and Birmingham...I have no idea if he got it right, but it sounded sufficiently unique.

What I like about the series is that each mystery is different in nature. The first was a murder with connections to Gillard's past, the next had a lot of international intrigue, the third a lot of family drama involving Gillard's aunts and now more traditional murder in a wealthy British-Indian family. The strength of Louth's writing and characterization is seen in the complex web of character inter-relationships that are easy to keep track of as each character is very well developed and distinct. In many mysteries with a large cast of characters I have to make a character list to keep everyone straight. I did not have to with this book.

My only knocks on it is the use of his conniving aunt from the previous book as a little more than plot device. It was clear from the end of the previous book she would carry into this one, but her only real role is to make Detective Gillard's wife miserable and in this book his wife is a background character while his fellow investigators take a front seat. The book relies too much on the cop devoted to his job and wife who is neglected for it cliché that come up too often in modern detective fiction in books and on tv. I know it is based on realism but it gets repetitive as a recurrent plot

So intricate as to be contrived

Nick Louth is a very good writer with very good ideas, and a fresh take on writing crime novels, so I don't say this with any pleasure: his plots are a bit too complex. He seems to think he has to make up unbelievable coincidences (so you are drawn out of the very good story to observe how unbelievable they are) in order to make his books interesting or difficult to guess at, but he doesn't. There are great moments in his books, very good dialogue, but these twists that kind of ruin the story a little. Not enough that I'm not excited that he has another book coming out, but enough that I feel a small smudge of dread, thinking about how cumbersome his next plot might be, and how it might mar the story.
The narrator is great, doing justice to the different voices. Actually, he's a genius at accents so I absolutely ate it up when he went into an Albanian-accented English, or when he totally nailed the scottish burr, and all kinds of variations of accents within Great Britain. It's tough being a voice actor with a deeper voice and having to "be" women, but he gives his best and it's a delight.

Great Book

Nick Louth is my favorite writer. Medical details are always well-researched and accurate. Nothing is more annoying than a story that isn't believable because science doesn't support it. All of the DCI Gillard books are amazing and I have listened to each of them more than once.

Marston York's voice is smooth and delicious to listen to. He is able to do countless British and Indian accents beautifully, and performs a female voice effortlessly. It is such a shame that the audiobook community has not yet discovered this gem of a voice!

edge of your seat

this is the best of the series. twists and turns, 'til the end. a wonderful exposition of what happens when you mix out of date mindsets with modern business and entrepreneurial individuals.

Another Fabulous Installment To The Series

DCI Craig Gillard became involved in a Sunday morning slaying in a snowy English town. The matriarch of an Indian family whose claim to fame was their amazing spice empire, was murdered as she walked her boxer in a snowy park. The assault was delivered by a speeding bicyclist wielding an altered workout weight with which he bashed her brain, turning the fresh snowfall a gruesome red! Witnessing the event was a new detective, Kirsty, who was walking her own dog at the same time ; yet despite her timely and skillful preservation of the crime scene, arresting the perpetrator was not an easy job! Louth writes such very imaginative personal relationships, that it is only natural for the reader to feel empathy,,, and sometimes anger with his well written characters!

Marston York was again excellent with the delivery of the story