Utter waste of a credit

This is actually the second book in the Jack Harris series, not the fourth so after reading the first I decided to try listening to the second, I really quite enjoyed ''Dead Hill'' so I thought this one would be it's equal but I was wrong, very wrong.

So what is wrong with it?

1) The characters - They are all one dimensional imbeciles: the policemen who think nobody from outside of Cumbria has ever heard a vixen, a DCI who swears at witnesses and reporters, intimidates witnesses, suspects and journalists, physically assaults photographers and refuses to believe there is any connection between any of the happenings despite not having done ANY investigation (he's just convinced nobody from 'his patch' would get up to such things!), a journalist who allows herself to be bulllied by DCI Harris, and the suspects who all whinge and whine more than in an average police prodeecural, I could not stand a single character in the book.


2) The story - It opens wiith a character (Josh) killing a woman, we know she's very definitely a woman because of various things that Josh 'thinks to himself'. However, later in the book we're told that Josh is mentally disturbed and has only killed dogs, rather a lot of them, but no women (apparently). Now, this would indeed be a serious mental condition, for a person not to be able to tell the difference between canine and human, so you'd expect Josh to be admitted to hospital (which he is) and kept in for treatment but he's back out at the end of the book, reparing the damage the police caused to the garden whilst digging up the dogs. That's not the only problem with the story but I'm not going to expand further because my review would end up longer than the book itself.

3) The narrator - He makes all the characters sound like they're sighing, whining wrecks, the male voices are bad enough but the female voices are a pure disaster. His portrayal of DCI Jack Harris himself, however, could be said to be fairly accurate since the DCI is an unpleasant man who does little other than snarl at people.

And, what's good about it?

1) It's brevity!

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