Review: Another Place to Die

Another Place to Die by Mark Hayden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When local mobster Matt Cross is murdered in his own woods with his own shotgun, DCI Tom Morton and DC Elaine Fraser are brought in as a last resort to head up a team of officers drawn from anywhere except Southport because Matt had his finger in so many pies that finding a local officer without (ahem) a vested interest would be difficult.

Tom soon finds that he has been saddled with all the misfits that other divisions didn't want. The clock-watchers, the skivers, the dim-witted and the purely antagonistic. He also has a lot of potential motives for the murder: was it a rival racketeer? Was it something to do with his environmental activities? Was it a power grab by one of his deputies? Was it a family thing?

And then, just when his neck is on the line to wrap the murder investigation up quickly, purely by coincidence, Lucy White turns up in Southport to manage a local coffee shop owned by a football legend. Not only that, Lucy seems to have landed right in amongst Matt's deputies and shady businesses.

This is much more of a procedural detective story than the Operation Jigsaw trilogy, following on from the previous book. Yet there is still that interlinking with Tom's family, the chaste romance with Lucy, Elaine's rugby-playing husband and all the twisty, turny, cast of thousands narrative that keeps a reader glued to the book.

In just over one month I have read 14 books by Mark Hayden, starting, as so many others seem to have done, with the King's Watch series then going back to the Operation Jigsaw trilogy and finally with the two Tom Morton novels. Mark Hayden definitely has a crowded writing style, he writes from the POV of lots of characters, often with no indication that the narrator has changed. He references characters and events in other stories, which is fine for me because I've binge read them in a short space of time but could be difficult to follow if you read them across a longer timeframe. Yet I love them, I love Conrad in the King's Watch series and I love Tom in this latest series, I see in his author afterword that Mark Hayden suggests he might put Tom, Elaine and/or Lucy in Eight Kings so now I'm going to have to go back and search for them!

I am devastated that there are now no new (to me) Mark Hayden books for me to read.

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