Murder on Oxford Lane: Tony Bassett **

By Brian Clegg

This Midlands-set novel takes young police sergeant Sunita Roy and her colleagues into a satisfyingly complex mystery where a search for a missing property developer soon gets tied in to two murders. And there’s a nice little sub-plot where Roy is being (seriously) harassed by a former boyfriend. It isn’t a whodunnit in the traditional sense as essential information to identify the culprit(s) does not emerge until right at the end of the book – but it is a genuinely interesting plot.

It’s just a shame that Tony Bassett’s writing style does not live up to his plotting – it verges on the dire. We are over-provided with adjectives and weak descriptions like ‘The visitors noticed a wealth of original features, including some ancient oak beams and a log-burning open fire.’ Not only painful, but featuring a strange shared point of view. The whole thing appears dashed off, as there are often inconsistencies, such as ‘Does he have an office or study here?’ Margaret shook her head. Next page ‘… but you’re welcome to see his bank statements. They’re in his study upstairs…’

The police themselves are sometimes painfully amateurish. More often than not they get the police caution wrong. And the reasoning applied when thinking about suspects would embarrass the most feeble of sleuths. In deciding that a PE teacher isn’t a likely suspect (an opinion that won’t necessarily last), for example, we hear these inspiring words: ‘His job requires him to help improve the physical health of children. That doesn’t fit with someone who’s killed three times over a few weeks.’ Hmm. Who needs Scotland Yard?

I also wish (thought I admit this is unlikely to bother many readers) Bassett had bothered to speak to someone involved in church choirs. As a former choirmaster, I found it painful that the missing character was reading through a ‘lyric sheet’ of the carol Of the Father’s Heart Begotten before what sounds like several intensive weeks of practising it. I’ve never known a church choir with parts (he’s a tenor) use a lyric sheet, let alone spend more than five minutes practising a straightforward hymn like this. To make it worse, Bassett illustrates his erudition by referring to it as a fifth-century hymn. Admittedly the original Latin words were late fourth century, but this version has Victorian words to a tune from the medieval carol collection, Piae Cantiones of 1582.

I’m glad I stuck with it to the end to see how it all turned out: but it could have been so much better.

You can buy Murder on Oxford Lane 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.