Review: Not Your Average Murder Mystery
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 26, 2014
The mix of writing styles encouraged me to look up Sean and Daniel Campbell. two brothers who decided to write a book in 90 days. They have in fact written three and this one is their second effort.Cleaver Square begins as a straightforward child murder where the processes of forensic science, and legal machinations are explained to discover who the killer was. However it soon became an unusual and fascinatingly complex plot as it turns out the boy who died is not whothey thought he was and another boy is using his name - but why?The pace grinds down in places because the barrister half of the author partnership is determined the reader must know every single step of, say how a search warrant is obtained. No minion waving a sheet of paper beneath Detective Morton's nose yelling, 'I've got the warrant, Guv.' No, we have the attendance at court, the presentation argument for obtaining the said warrant and the comments of the judge who is covering his arse in case it goes pear-shaped  and they find nothing - which frankly I thought wasn't necessary.There is an interesting twist in that the lead detective is also a victim of identity fraud and has to cope with the frustration of an uninterested legal and banking system - which again is so detailed, I wonder if the Campbells have been through it themselves. If so they have my sympathy.Then there is the very details process of how science is used to obtain material evidence - again very laborious. I don't need to know which acid is dripped on which sample to get the result and what colour it turns. I know it works for TV with Gil Grissom giving a monologue bent over a microscope, but not in a novel where an unrelated character has to be introduced to explain the process.I also detected a marked difference in the two author styles, which was distracting at times as I could tell before looking him up, that Daniel was a teenager, but tried to ignore the less mature writing with the repeated words, bad punctuation and Americanisms and let the story pull me along - which it did!An interesting, and compelling read.  If these brothers invest in a good editor, they will be unstoppable.