Letter from the Dead - Jack Gatland ****

By Brian Clegg

Jack Gatland (real name Tony Lee) has an extremely slick writing style – it feels almost like an American crime writer producing a novel set in the UK. The setting is reminiscent of a police version of Mick Herron’s Slough House intelligence service novels, televised as Slow Horses. Where that series involves a set of misfit, but in their odd way highly capable, spies, here we get the brilliant rejects of the police service, collected as ‘The Last Chance Saloon’.

Herron’s series predates Gatland’s by five years – yet despite only starting it four years ago, the prolific Gatland has already produced 20 titles in the DI Walsh series, with other books alongside. You might imagine this would result in sub-standard writing. There are certainly more little errors than I would usually expect in a professionally published series, but Gatland has some excellent over-the-top plotting, and really keeps the tension up and the action flowing. 

To illustrate, I can give an example of each from the second book in the series, which I’m currently reading. A trivial but irritating example of the little mistakes that frequently occur is that we have a Catholic referring to a priest as a vicar. But, to counter this, there’s a brilliant bit of plotting in book 2 (Murder of Angels) where a body is discovered and forensically identified, only to have another body with the same forensic markers dug up somewhere else.

As well as Herron’s books I was also reminded of Ben Aaronovich’s Rivers of London series. Letter from the Dead isn’t fantasy, but it does have that same feel with the camaraderie of outsiders in the police unit. In this first book in the series, the main character Declan Walsh is in danger of being suspended after both hitting a clergyman and uncovering corruption at a police station. But instead he joins the Last Chance Saloon to help solve a murder from years previously after new evidence comes to light. The main suspects were MPs at the time, but are now a contender for Prime Minister, a TV evangelist and a homeless drunk.

At the same time there is an underlying suspicion that Walsh’s recently deceased father was killed, though there is as yet no evidence, giving an extended story arc that will no doubt run across several novels. It’s a genuine page turner and I’ll be back for more.

You can buy Letter from the Dead from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com 

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.