Peter Turnbull

Ed McBain's 87th Precinct relocated to Glasgow? What could be more fun? I started this book -- about the boys and gurrrls of P Division tackling the murder of someone who's had his face shot off -- with enormously high expectations, and was immensely disappointed. The Ed McBain-homage element is assuredly there -- there's even a passage about the city being a woman -- but . . . Well, maybe the "but" is exemplified by the fact that Turnbull's passage about the city being a woman is actually show more funnier than the one in the McBain parody I put in Dave Langford's and my Earthdoom, and I'm absolutely certain Turnbull didn't mean it to be. McBain's wonderful skill was that often his books consisted more of his marvelous, endlessly entertaining digressions than they did plot; yes, of course we care about whodunnit, but the joy is in being with the boys and gals of the 87th as they chatter and badinage their way through events. Turnbull seems to have got the message that there should be lots of digressions and backflashes, but not that these should be witty and a delight in themselves. In a sense, then, his city-is-a-woman passage was a high point for me; elsewhere, though, every time the text moved into a particular selfconscious tone that heralded yet another boring-as-hell digression or backflash, I found myself gloomily leafing forward to check where this particular piece of dullery might come to an end.

Others may find exactly the opposite -- I believe Turnbull has many devotees -- but this is how it was for me. show less

When a middle-aged man comes across a familiar antique in a store window, he sets in motion a re-examination of a cold case: the murder of three family members 20 years earlier, apparently in the course of a robbery but never solved. DCI Hennessey and his team are interested to discover that a distant neighbor who had not been interviewed at the time of the crime recalls seeing a group of four people standing by the home where the murders occurred the day after the event - and also a day or show more two *before* it. This in turn leads them to discover a string of crimes not previously connected, and when a fresh murder occurs, they know that they are on the right track finally…. One of the long-running Hennessey and Yellich series, “A Dreadful Past” continues with the laying out of careful police work, where there are not a lot of thrilling chases or intuitive leaps, but instead it’s a matter of seeing how part A joins to part B and C and so on; not glamorous, but effective nonetheless. I like this series for that reason, although some repetition between one book and the next does get tiresome; still, I think the reader can pick up this series at any point and find it enjoyable. Recommended. show less

When the leg of a woman is found in a garbage can, it doesn’t take DCI Hennessey and DS Yellich to put the husband into the frame: after all, the couple fought incessantly, he was known to have serial affairs and she had started the process of divorce. Plus, the man’s first wife had disappeared many years ago, a fact suspicious in itself. But the case turns out to be more complicated than it first appears, and it seems that there might be more than one murderer in town…. I know some show more readers chafe at the seemingly unchanging nature of the characters in this series, but this book should put paid to that complaint: not only is Hennessey’s important relationship more front and center (as opposed to being referenced only at the end of the book), there is a rift between the DCI and his Sergeant, Yellich, such that Hennessey for the first time is beginning to wonder if he really should retire after all. The storyline is well-plotted and interesting, as I always find with this series, but I also enjoyed this change-up in character relations; recommended! show less

When the body of a woman is found on the bank of the river, DCI Hennessey and his team initially suspect accidental death as it appears that the woman froze in the night. However, it is soon discovered that she had apparently been starved for some time, strangled and then dumped although not yet dead. Further, the identity that they uncover is not her own, a finding that leads some of the team to Canada in search of a killer…. This is the 20th novel in the Hennessey and Yellich series, but show more the first to be available as an e-book; like the earlier entries, there is some repetition here (involving the past and present lives of the main characters), but the story itself is well-told and with some nice twists and turns. Recommended. show less