Alan James Roll

An interesting short detective novella in which the central detective, Jason Ascalon, an interesting character in himself (an obsessive glove wearer – does he have an aversion to germs?), seems to wade through large tracts of the English literary landscape to find the culprit for a young girls death. It is lifted from the norm of detective fiction (especially of the Kindle kind) by the characterisation and by the occasional bit of prose: “He remembered the arm, clad in yellow plastic, raised high in the wild heather, caught in natures touch, absorbed beneath waves of fevered purple flowers.” There is also some truth in his description of the outcast youths Ascalon encounters when visiting the strange Poet Club: “How many like her were out there? People to whom the twenty-first century was a foreign landscape. No bright tomorrows for this lot, they were anachronisms caught in the forward gears of the machinery of modernity; and caught there destined for the most part to be crushed by its relentlessness.” I wavered between four or five stars, but as I am measuring it against other crime fiction, which I read far too much of, and I want to encourage up and coming authors, I plumped for five.… (meer)