It's my first experience with a Peter May novel. I do have one of his on my TBR pile for later in the year for reasons which will become known when I get round to it. However, I wasn't expecting it to be my choice so I just named this randomly for possible humour value and the fact that I'd only bought it the week before and it was close at hand.
The basic storyline - in the middle of a pandemic which has shut down London, a child's skeleton is found dumped in a holdall on a bulding site. It's up to D.I. Jack MacNeil, on his last day in the job to track down the killer/s.
It starts off actually quite well. It's certainly a pageturner. I started on Sunday evening and finished it at about 6 today (Wednesday) despite only really reading it at lunch at work and about 3 hours in total at home. The 400 pages pretty much flew past.
It needs a serious copy edit though. It really does feel like it's a bottom drawer idea that he's pulled out and thrown at the publishers because of the current situation. there are plot holes big enough to drive a tank through, and inconsistencies that go beyond suspension of disbelief.
We can all do some willing suspension of disbelief at an unlikely storyline. This, however, would need me to be held at gunpoint while a team of navvies built a structure strong enough to attempt the hold.
Spoilers will appear past this point of the review...
As I said, it starts off relatively well. I'm not entirely certain that a police chief would pass a case like this onto a detective working literally his final shift - even in a pandemic situation - but that's what the police chief does. MacNeil soon finds himself embroiled in a case bigger than he thought possible.
His disabled Chinese girlfriend, Amy, is tasked with building a reconstruction of the dead girl's face from the skull. In a negative point towards his inclusivity score, his girlfriend's best friend on the force, other than him, is an openly gay officer who believes McNeill to be a homophobic apeman. This idea isn't explored in nay detail other than Tom not liking MacNeil. No chance is given for repararion and the only phone call between the two men shows Tom to be the asshole in their working relationship.
While Amy is building the replica face in record time, we're introduced to a serial killer for hire who calls himself Pinky after the Graham Greene character. If anything Pinky emerges from the final narrative as more sympathetic than Tom, but more of that to come. IN his first kill, Pinky shoots a random old woman in the head and stops to feed her cat before he leaves the flat. This shows he's a nice guy really. (and to be honest, feeding your murder victim's cat on the way out would make me ask for a mercy plea in court)
MacNeil runs round from clue to clue (including a very well realised section in an underground club still operating durig the crisis) piecing together an unimaginable (or so Peter May thinks) conspiracy. Most of the people he talks to end up dead at the hands of a mystery sniper (Pinky) but at no point does he think that maybe the sniper is following him.
It actually all works pretty well until the mid two hundreds pages mark. By this point, Macneil has ignored a voicemail from Amy, allegedly not just his lover but a close work colleague, helping him on his final case. No particular reason is given for him ignoring the voicemail she leaves him, nor is any explanation given for when she leaves her flat without leaving a follow up voicemail so he knows where to find her after the panic of the first voicemail.
This is a cardinal sin in any thriller writing. If you get a voicemail from your work colleague/lover in the middle of an investigation, you don't just ignore it. He's been in contant contact with her up until this point and all the details he's been feeding her in various converations up to now have been fed back to the big bad guy (although Amy doesn't know this).
We've also met his ex-wife and heard about his son. However, the boy dies and the wife just fades out of the narrative never to be mentioned again. The boy's death is given as motivation several times in the last half of the book though.
Things take a serious turn for the worst when Pinky crashes his car and MacNeil, who happens to be driving across the same bridge less than a minute later, drags him out of the burning wreck. Two things go seriously wrong here. First we're told that after McNeil pulls Pinky out of the car, the soldiers pull the other passenger (who for the purposes of narrative tension should you decide to read the book shall remain nameless) out of the car with various expressions of disgust about the state he's in at the time. Four pages later, the burning car has been extinguished and we're told the body of the passenger is still in the burned out wreck...
Secondly, we're told that Pinky is feeling no pain, despite being covered in full thickness (third degree as was) burns. It might be true that a full thickness burn won't hurt as the burn has gone right through the pain receptors, but, around the edge of every full thickness burn, is a partial thickness burn (second degree as was), which will be right on the most painful part of the flesh and will make a grown man scream with pain. Around every Partial thickness burn is a superficial burn (First degree burn as was), which also hurts like hell. Basically, if there was so little of his flesh left that he was one complete full thickness burn, he'd be dead. However, he's well enough to stab a soldier, steal his gun and run off to hold Tom and Amy hostage.
Why Tom and Amy haven't called for backup in the meantime since they're not currently being held captive by Pinky is up for debate.
The conspiracy at the heart of the story is blindingly obvous by this point. MacNeil has run into an epidemiologist whilst trying to break into a house at three in the morning - as you do. She serves as comic relief and as someone to explain the technical side of the plot to MacNeil while he runs around being violent.
Subtlety is not a strong point in this narrative - the company that produce the only drug that works against the pandemic is called Stein & Franks... hmmm... there's not an obvious clue in that name is there.
It all leads to the silliest action packed climax to any book I've read in years. If I thought it was inetentionally funny, I would be giving huge respect. However, I think it's just lousy writing.
It was certainly a page turner, and hasn't put me off reading another of his later this year. The first two thirds of the book were just about good enough to forgive. However, if the next one falls over so badly plot-wise in the last act, I think I might not read any more of his.
5/10 try much harder and hire a copy editor.
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