Gallowstree Lane by Kate London

          2.5 Stars

This book starts off in an extremely promising way.  A young black man is stabbed in the thigh and his best friend witnesses it, terrified of the repercussions he fades in to the night and leaves his friend with an off duty paramedic.  The young man dies on the roadside and as the police arrive it initially looks like just another turf war but it soon becomes apparent that it reaches much, much further than that. 

I was so excited about this book until I got about 70 pages in.  First off, whilst being authentic, it has my pet peeve - British youth speaking like they are from South Central Los Angeles, all this blud and calling police the Feds.  Yes, I know they do it but it makes me irrationally angry so seeing either (or both) term cropping up every few pages grated.  This, however, is purely personal and has not affected the rating I have given this book.

The low rating is simply because I really did not enjoy the story.  It is clear from our first introduction to Sarah Collins that we are already supposed to know these members of the Police Force.  I have not read either of the previous two books by Kate London so Kieran Shaw, Lizzie Graham and Sarah are completely new characters to me.  Because there is no narrator here you are relying on the text to provide you with clues to their personalities.  Sadly, it seems to be assumed that we already know these people.  There are references to previous cases but these shed no light on the people.

With no way of getting in to a character's personality you are left with a series of events.  Undoubtedly the procedures described are realistic and describe accurately how investigations in the 21st Century are run.  Regrettably, this means that there are long periods of sitting around doing little with sudden bursts of activity.  Normally I would expect this to be filled with a sense of camaraderie between officers (think Lynda La Plante or Carol Wylie) but there is none of that here.  This downtime is used for an insight in to mental waffling about the case which neither furthers the readers understanding of events or moves the plot on.

Fortunately the story swaps between the police and the members of the Eardsley Bluds that are being investigated for 3 crimes that all somehow link.  Because these are clearly new people on the author's stage we do get a sense of Shakiel and learn quite a lot about Ryan.  It was these sections (even if their language irritated me) that kept me reading.

Suffice to say I will not be going back and reading this author's first two books.  I found myself just not interested enough in the recurring characters to want to try and find out more about them.

THIS IS AN HONEST REVIEW OF A FREE COPY OF THE BOOK RECEIVED FROM READERS FIRST.