CHALK VALLEY is quite long for a first novel but Dan holds it all together quite well. It really is a police procedural commentating on the way cases are often bigger than the resources devoted to them. There are frequently disparate repositories of knowledge and slavishly following strict procedures and protocols often doesn't bring them together in a meaningful way.

The novel highlights the way Canadian jurisdictions often compete with each other, but also that local policemen are often not equipped either through knowledge of experience to run a more complex case.

Lead investigator John McCarty really doesn't have the capacity for the bigger picture. He is convinced the way to go is to sift all the evidence from phone ins etc, categorise the data, and then proceed. The problem is that this is time consuming, and doesn't really ask the investigators to think too much.

This was indeed turning out to be a very different kind of murder case than the domestics and drug murders Chalk Valley was used to.

He thought through how he would run the meeting. Just keep it under control; it’s my case, and no Vancouver Metro shit for brains is going to take it over or tell me how to run it. Cases are built up of a delicate web of leads, evidence, information known only to the cop and the suspect, fragile strands to be protected at all costs. The last thing any cop wanted would be for some numbnuts to fuck things up and taint their witness by asking the wrong question, backing them into an error or even a lie, making it inadmissible in court, which in turn could basically shoot a case all to hell. When you share, you lose control.

Ironically, there was a time, early in the novel, when, if McCarty had been carrying out his duties as he should have been, he would have nipped a crime in the bud and been able to take the serial killer before he killed another woman.

Add to that the fact that McCarty has personal problems.

In fact it takes a persistent RCMP Sergeant following his gut feeling and an experienced observer from Metro to set the ball rolling. Meanwhile the reader has always known who the murderer is.

A novel with this structure, where the characters don't make all the connections, but the reader is omniscient, is not easy carry off and the author does it pretty well.

I particularly liked the characterisation, the occasional touches of irony, and real human interest that surfaced. ( )