john harvey, gone to ground
Stephen Bryan, a gay academic, is found brutally murdered in his bathroom. Will Grayson and Helen Walker , police detectives investigating the case, at first assume that his death is the result of an ill-judged sexual encounter … but doubts are soon raised.
On the whole I enjoyed this police procedural set in Cambridge. It was refreshing to have a largely ’town’ rather than ‘gown’ crime, with the promise of police investigation rather than amateur sleuthing in the cosy crime tradition. However, the book did have something of a split personality with a complex historical back story being investigated in parallel by the victim’s sister.
It scored points on the crime cliche-o-meter with a distracting domestic difficulties and pressure from senior officers upon the hard-pressed heroic detective (not quite ‘you’ve got 24 hours to break the case’ but almost).
