Tangled Web UK Review December 2007
A Kind of Acquaintance (Frank Kavanagh) by
David Armstrong
hbk out December 07
Published by Severn House
at £18.99
Solid British crime from Armstrong who returns to the country’s waterways, a landscape he made excellent use of in his debut Night’s Black Agent’s, which was short-listed for the CWA best first novel award. That title was set in the 1930s but this one is contemporary, the fourth in his Kavanagh and Salt police series. The canal setting and the juxtaposition of rural and suburban areas offers an interesting perspective and allows for the confluence of quite disparate characters. In A Kind of Acquaintance, twenty years after the disappearance of a newspaper boy, the body of a novelist is found dead in the Grand Union Canal. We are introduced to several people who may be connected to the crimes and get to know them in some detail. The emphasis on their stories past and present means that the police investigation is done with a light touch, there is no room to get bogged down in procedure. Armstrong plays by the rules of the genre in encouraging the reader to speculate as to whodunit and gives us a fair shot at guessing the culprit. Detective duo, Frank Kavanagh and his lover and colleague Jane Salt, hold very different views about the way of the world, which makes for some vigorous arguments along the way.
(
Cath Staincliffe
author of the popular Sal Kilkenny mysteries and the series creator of TV Blue Murder)
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