"Murder at the Seaside" by Brian Gee

 Perhaps the ultimate in police procedural: this is a whodunnit from the perspective of the man who writes the forensic strategy. The level of detail is so overwhelming, so authoritative, that I can only presume that the 'other job' for this author is as a forensic scene of crime officer. Given the almost equally detailed setting, I'm also pretty sure that he lives in or around Eastbourne on the south coast of England.

This level of detail have the story a huge degree of authenticity and was frequently fascinating. Sometimes this went over the top: I didn't really need to know about who made the tea. But on the whole, the slow and steady account of how a police investigation proceeds was hypnotic and kept me reading. 

However, what it did mean was that a lot of what was recounted was irrelevant. There were three interwoven stories at the start of which two were relevant and one ended abortively about half way through. I'm not sure what the purpose of this story was, other than to introduce us to the SOCO team.

On the other hand the pacing was spot on. There were major turning points at the quarter, half and three-quarters ("That was when the screams started"); the key murder is about one third of the way through.

The story is told from the point of view of each of the major players in the drama, although in the third person and the past tense. There is no sense of the character's voice in their chapters; the narration is uniform and almost as pedestrian as a stereotypical police statement in court. This flat delivery ensured that there was no sense of melodrama despite the murder plotline.

It is difficult to evaluate it as a book because I have never encountered a novel that was less of a novel. It didn't feel like fiction. It's not a whodunnit or a mystery: the only suspense is around whether or not the murderer will get away with it. But if you want to grapple with the real mundane nitty-gritty of forensic investigation, this is the book for you.

Selected quotes:

• "It was, he mused, one of those places that you wiped your feet on the way out rather than on the way in." (Ch 4)

August 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God