False Witness by
Patricia Hall
hbk out December 04
Published by Allison Busby
at £18.99
Whatever happened to London? The Smoke and the Home Counties were
once the traditional hunting ground for British crime stories, but now,
apart from several well-known spots in Portsmouth, Oxford and Brighton,
everyone has got North! Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham
and above all, West Yorkshire have scooped the criminal pool for
locations, as in this book.
Patricia Hall's 'Ackroyd and Thackeray' series is one of the best known,
using the well-trodden path of male DCI with female cop - or in this case
journalist - as the counterpoint. I read this one with a mild sense of déjà
vu, as it was so similar to the last one - not in the plot details, but in the
nature of the running characters, the locale and the general dark ambience
of the story.
DCI Michael Thackeray is another senior copper stooped under the
burden of his past, as his wife has been brain damaged after a suicide
attempt twelve years before, following her depressive murder of their
baby. He is not a character with whom the reader can empathise and as I
remarked in a previous review, one can hardly credit that a vivacious
young woman like Laura Ackroyd would put up for so long with his
humourless, miserable nature, racked with guilt and incipient alcoholism.
Laura once again gets into ill-favour with Mike through her grandmother,
a spent Old Labour supporter, who enlists Laura to investigate the abrupt
arrest of a black youth for beating in the skull of the headmaster of a
school for local reprobates. A DCI in a neighbouring town marched in
when Thackeray was posted away and leaves a trail of racist problems
behind, including the derailment of two Asian police officers.
This is not a fun book, but is a gloomy story about urban unrest, poverty,
racial tension and personal tooth-gnashing and breast-beating, with no
trace of humour or wit to lighten the atmospehere.
I get the impression that the characters have now been a little too long in
their restricted environment, performing variations on the same theme.
Maybe the undoubted talents of Patricia Hall should move on to
something else and let Ackroyd and Thackeray walk hand in hand into
the sunset.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
False Witness by
Patricia Hall
