No Turning Back by Sam Blake

          Set in Dublin, No Turning Back, attempts to give us an insight in to the working of the Garda from the perspective of a very determined young officer - Cat Connolly.  Nothing wrong with that except the nicknames they have for each other and the details of interpersonal relationships all feels a little superficial.  This may be because this is clearly a few books in to a series (I checked - this is the third book chronicling the events in the life and career of Cat Connolly) and so we are expected to already know the important people in her life.  It does work as a stand alone book though, even if the events of previous cases do seep in on a fairly regular basis.

There are a couple of intertwined tales going on here.  You have the hit and run murder of a young man with distinguished parents, the discovery of a young girls body on the cliffe which may or may not be misadventure and a nice slice of cyber crime and a devolution on to the Dark Web.  Unfortunately this does lead to things becoming very muddy with no real separation of the threads and I did find myself becoming a little confused as to how all the characters linked together and how this was supposed to gel together in to one tale.

Couple this with regular asides in to Cat's private life and her emotional attachment to a superior officer.  Then the seemingly pointless introduction of a professor at Trinity College - I am still not entirely sure what point this character served apart from to link the Garda to the CIA to expose the cybercimes being perpetrated under their noses.  Quite a lot of page space is devoted to this character as well so I think that their may have been editing decisions made with the overall plot trajectory that now make her feel superfluous to some extent.

There is a decent plot buried amongst some of the faff and flannel in the narrative.  Certainly the ultimate denouement was fairly unexpected and the way at which the reveal is made shows that it is the slow plodding of procedure that gets results and not maverick intuition.  Tension, however, is hard to come by.  Just as it starts to build in one area of the investigation the next chapter will sidle off in to Cat's private life or to one of the other strands of the crimes being explained and it all fizzles out.

Not one of my favourite books of the genre but certainly not one of the worst I have read.  It is pretty much middle of the road and does provide a modicum of entertainment; just not enough to make me want to read Cat Connolly's back story or be too invested in where she moves on to next.