Dark Crimes - Michael Hambling ***
By Brian Clegg
This 2016 novel is the first in a series featuring Chief Inspector Sophie Allen (Michael Hambling has gone on to write 13 more), a detective who bucks the crime fiction trend by not having a terrible social life and being quite a nice person. It is a police procedural through and through – Hambling really does give a good feel for the level of detailed work required to get to a solution in what turns out to be a complex crime, as a single death is followed by more bodies emerging.
I found it refreshing that we did have a detective without a miserable home life, and found the crime satisfyingly complex and the detail quite interesting. There’s also quite a nice little twist towards the end. There was one oddity, though, that, despite being relatively modern, there was very little use of CCTV – at one point, the suspected killer’s van is known to be parked somewhere then drives off, but there is no attempt to follow it up using video.
In principle I should have rated this higher, but in a way, the positives of the approach got in the way of an effective story. Although Allen’s home address is discovered by the killer, there’s never really any sense of menace, and the trouble with emphasising the police procedural aspect is that proper policing is, I’m sure, often rather dull. And the very gradual building of a case here did sometimes drag.
Not at all a bad book, less cosy than cosy crime, but less miserable for the cops than seems to be the case with many murder mystery teams. I don’t want to damn it with faint praise, but probably the best summary is that I quite enjoyed it.
You can buy Dark Crimes from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com
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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.
Source: http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2025/11/dark-crimes-michael-hambling.html
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