Review: 2 1/2 Stars Actually, Beware If You Really Like British Procedurals -- Spoilers in Review
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 25, 2014
Sometimes there is no way to explain what is wrong with a mystery without spoilers.  This is one of those occasions.DS Kate Redman is starting in a new station and her first case involves the death of a nanny and the disappearance of a three month old baby.  The reality show celebrity mother is devastated, the workaholic father just seems to want to keep on working.  The father's secretary is behaving suspiciously as is the mother's ex-agent and just about everyone else which might be a good idea for the plot if they were behaving suspiciously in a believable way.The story actually begins in an interesting fashion but it shortly starts to break down as the investigators start to behave in a less and less believable way.Now for Spoilers.Kate begins with an understandable feeling of disquiet about the disappearance of the baby.  But by the time the book is half over she's flinching and twitching just about every time she sees a baby. Not because she's concerned about this baby but because she gave up her baby for adoption at the age of 17.  Considering her reaction any time she starts thinking about it I wonder how she managed to pass the psychological tests to joint the police force.in the first place.Detectives who are off beat like Henry Bingham's Detective Constable Fiona Griffiths and Alison Bruce's DC Goodhew can be both entertaining and off kilter. Poor Kate Redman just seems off kilter. Her big breakthrough occurs when she connects the look on a person's face in a photograph with the look on the face of the woman who adopted her baby twelve years before.Except for one other Detective Sergeant, the other members of the force are not fleshed out.  And the one who is has a gay relationship, but instead of being up front about it lets Kate think that his partnerJoe is a female for a good part of the book. While he might not want to meet a co-worker with a handshake and a "Hi, I'm gay", there's clearly more natural ways to handle that situation, even when the gay characters may at first glance appear very stereotypical.By the time I was half way through I was picking up on small errors that I might have otherwise not even noticed.  For instance the time on an interview was given in 12 hour format when it should have been 24 hour. Kate had behaved rather brashly and hastily toward a suspect and her DCI was talking about having her thrown off the force if she did it again.  Also the DCI seems to be psychic about the lives of his underlings since he knows about Kate's adoption and Mark's domestic problems.Anyway, I can't really recommend this book although I can say that the typos I noticed where minimal though the syntax at times was awkward.