Barrie
Roberts may be known to some of you as a chronicler of those
limitless Sherlock Holmes cases Watson and Conan Doyle never got
round to writing, but he has another string to his literary bow.
Drawing on his 20 years in criminal law, he has also created a
contemporary series featuring Midland lawyer Chris Tyroll.
Book four starts
promisingly enough with a busy day at Tyroll's office. Workers
sacked from a local arms factory want him to handle their industrial
tribunal, a father wants his help to recover children's ponies
seized from an apparently unused field and a distraught mother is
determined to prove that her teenage son's death was not the suicide
ruled by the court.
By now the reader is
probably well ahead of Tyroll in twigging that all three disparate
cases are linked somehow. The investigation of the boy's death and a
second suspected suicide seems about to provide some narrative meat
to the lightly written tale, but then we take a detour into the
employment dispute. Authentic although these sections are, you do
want Tyroll and his inevitably feisty Aussie girlfriend - who really
does say things like, "Don't come the raw prawn with me, cobber"
- to get back to their murder investigation.
And then it is over. It
is as if Roberts was given a very strict page limit by his publisher
and suddenly found he had only 20 minutes to wrap things up. To make
matters worse, Tyroll is incapacitated and it is up to others to
find the links while our supposed hero languishes in hospital. Even
lightweight escapism shouldn't be this disposable.
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