I found the book to be rather "dry" compared to the first five books in this series. It was almost as if there were too many plots that the author was trying to connect. I did find the mystery of Phillip's father very intriguing. Too bad that the story wasn't build entirely around that link. ( )

Philip Dryden is told by the police that his father has just been killed in an auto accident, the body burned beyond recognition, only the vehicle itself providing the identity of the owner. This is a second near-impossibility: His father had died 35 years before, drowned during the floods of 1977, the body swept away and never found. The thought that he might have survived and simply chosen not to return to his family is, to say the least, stunning. There are other story lines here, and a faint suspicion allowed that somehow they may be linked.. A West African man, seeking asylum in England but being forced to return to Niger; has been refused, without explanation, the return of the body of his infant daughter, buried, he is told, in an unmarked grave, and he and his wife seek Dryden's help. Then there is the mystery behind the murder of a local man whose already dead body had been hung from an irrigator in an open field. When another murder occurs, a very personal one for Dryden, his efforts to solve these crimes are redoubled.

The book started out rather slow for me but picked up by page 35 or so. The introduction of multiple plot lines helped. I believe if I had read some of the earlier books I maybe would have understood the characters more. This author is well worth the time to read. ( )

Jim Kelly’s ‘Nightrise’ is within touching distance of being a classic. Set in the picturesque, sinister fen landscape of East Anglia, wrongdoings both petty and monstrous are investigated by characters as charming as they are idiosyncratic.

The fens are a perfect setting for a crime novel. Despite a vast, open sky and endless bare horizon that seems to offer no opportunity for concealment, this is a part of the world, Kelly makes clear from the off, that offers a great deal of emptiness, the ideal location for doing nasty things and then burying the evidence. Deep. Forever. It’s a haunted landscape, full of secrets in the shape of drowned villages, graves marked and unmarked and secrets hidden behind locked doors and inside locked hearts. Not to mention the secrets of the past, never buried quite deep enough.

Here, location is not backdrop, it’s character. The weather on the fens is never less than extreme, from dry and dusty drove roads to oppressive heat or whole landscapes flooded. This is no ordinary place, there is no ordinary day here and there are no ordinary mysteries to be solved. The city of Ely is properly portrayed as a town of alleys, side streets and squares dominated by the cathedral that gives the city its status. The villages, hamlets, isolated farms and lonely houses radiate out across the fens, connected by arrow-straight drove roads and dykes, a landscape populated by migrant workers that can’t talk English, and insular locals who won’t talk for reasons of their own.

Kelly has ensured that the characters populating the landscape are just as extraordinary. Ely journalist and new father Philip Dryden is on the case, or rather, cases, of a wronged asylum seeker and what appears to be a brutal gang-related murder, as well as perusing a mystery much closer to home. It’s looking like a busy week as past and present collide with violent and, on a couple of occasions, shocking, results. Dryden is a fine amateur sleuth, with a bag-full of neuroses and character tics that never seem contrived.

Nightrise also puts Humph, Dryden’s driver and the owner of the only two-door taxi on the fens, in the driving seat. As a character, Humph is not so much fully rounded as morbidly obese, and a delight. The corpulent cabbie wears his rusting Capri like armour, sleeping and taking his meals in it. It comes complete with a mini-bar in the glove compartment, the merry miniatures of spirits gifts from the clients he takes on regular runs to Stansted Airport. The miniatures provide the perfect compliment to Dryden’s preferred eating habit of grazing on the contents of his standard-issue reporter’s overcoat. The glove compartment is also the place to plunder after one shock or another. In Nightrise, booze is in demand.

Humph ferries Dryden across the landscape of the fens in what could charitably be described as comfortable silence, broken only by Humph’s trademark uttering of the foreign phrases from the language he is learning for his annual holiday. But it’s when Humph does some investigative work of his own on behalf of the fare that has become a friend that Humph achieves the critical mass necessary to become ‘beloved’ as a character, as the scene of the investigation is a singles’ evening in a pub, an environment so far out of Humph’s comfort zone one suspects it would take either booster rockets attached to the Capri, or a firm and unlikely friendship, to get him there.

Despite his wife and child Dryden is a loner. Despite the constant companions in his cab Humph is a loner too. It’s a credit to Kelly that he can put two loners together and still maintain their loner status.

The pace of the novel moves like Humph’s Capri along a straight fenland road. The plot, however, is as pleasingly convoluted, muddied and obscured as the eddies and swirls of a flooded fen surrendered to the sea. This is breathless stuff that opens with blood and piles on the mysteries and murder with clues and solutions strung out expertly, creating tension without frustration and meshing together what could be described as very British crime with some modern, chilling, themes. ( )