Immoral by
Brian Freeman
hbk out October 05
Published by Headline
at £18.99
It is not hard to see why this first novel was selected as an International Book of the
Month in the USA, as the standard of writing is exceptionally good. It is a fairly
straightforward whodunit, albeit one whose timeline stretches over three years.
Based rather unusually in Duluth, Minnesota, a somewhat remote city at the extreme
end of the Great Lakes, it centres around a local detective, Lieutenant Jonathan Stride,
who is called to investigate the disappearance of an attractive but wilful teenager,
Rachel. She may have just have taken off, as so many girls do, especially given the
domestic disharmony in her home, but local feeling runs high, as another girl
vanished a year before and has never been found. Stride and his female Chinese
sergeant probe deeper into the case and he becomes convinced she is dead. Suspicion
hovers over several men, but eventually the stepfather is arrested and brought to trial.
One section of the book is a classic Grisham courtroom drama, which ends
unexpectedly in even more dramatic circumstances. Along the way, widower Stride
acquires a new wife from among the witnesses and a three-year gap ensues, when the
apparently dead story takes a new lease of life.
So well-written that it is a compulsive read, the only slight criticism might be that the
long arm of coincidence is stretched a little too far, but this is par for the course in so
many otherwise excellent crime novels and a little suspension of disbelief is a small
price to pay for such an excellent book.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
Immoral by
Brian Freeman
