The book is overly long as it is and every time it dipped into romance novel territory I rolled my eyes and sped up the reader. First of all, the whole romance part was just annoying. Both main characters are Scotland Yard Inspectors damaged by the First World War.
I like the Ian Rutledge series and honestly, this is very close in premise to them.
There seems to be a version with another narrator available perhaps better to try that one. General story telling, also, not really up to the standard of many others available. Other accents - 'general West Country', Brummie, Liverpudlian and Cockney itself seem to have been attempted for other characters from time to time none of them very successfully. (Apologies, Morningsiders, not suggesting that select part of Edinburgh is at all like the East End of London just that the accents are VERY different, and impact upon one's perception of character). To non-Scots, this may seem a rather pedantic observation, but imagine, for example, a character being described as Cornish or Cumbrian and yet being given a Cockney accent. The accent chosen for him was more appropriate to Morningside. But that narrator (Christopher Kay)! One of the principal characters is described as coming from Aberdeen. It was well over half way through before I began to care much about any of the characters, or be overly interested in what happened to them, though I'd have to say that the final third of the book is pretty good. Although Airth initially intended to write a trilogy about Madden, in 2014 he produced a fourth entry in the series, The Reckoning, and followed that with The Death of Kings (2017).Although the 'main' murders occur pretty near the beginning of the story, the book somehow takes a very long time after that to introduce everyone and longer still to develop their characters. A sequel, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, was published in 2003, and a third book, The Dead of Winter, in 2009. Airth found inspiration for that tale in a scrapbook about his uncle, a soldier killed in World War I.
The first of these, River of Darkness (1999), won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for best international crime novel in 2000 and was nominated for Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity awards in the States. His works include Snatch! (1969), Once A Spy (1981), and a series of murder mysteries set in England between 19 featuring Detective Inspector John Madden of Scotland Yard (later retired). Airth has also worked as foreign correspondent for the Reuters news service. Rennie Airth (born 1935) is a South African novelist who currently resides in Italy.
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