Review: Call the Dying

Call the Dying by Andrew Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The seventh novel in this detective series set in small town 1950s England featuring DI Richard Thornhill and journalist Jill Francis.

Three years have passed, Richard is now DCI Thornhill, in charge of the regional CID. Jill has had a difference of ideology with the new owner of the magazine she edits and has resigned/been sacked. Philip Weymss-Brown, the editor of Lydmouth's Gazette newspaper has had a heart attack and his wife Charlotte has asked Jill to return to Lydmouth to take temporary charge of the paper, which is currently losing a circulation war against its rival newspaper which itself has just been acquired by a national chain.

The elderly and irascible Doctor Bayswater has ostensibly retired and sold his practice to an incomer, the devastatingly attractive Dr Leddon, but appears to have fallen out with him and refuses to honour their agreement to sell Dr Leddon part of his property to set up a new NHS practice - as an aside it was fascinating to see Dr Bayswater's mistrust of the NHS.

It's the advent of television, and Richard's family is not immune to the lure, but when a London TV salesman goes missing somewhere between Lydmouth and London it turns out to be a baffling disappearance, especially when one of his distinctive yellow gloves is found beside the body of Dr Bayswater.

Oh, and there's also someone who goes around pee-ing through people's letterboxes, nice!

Although I enjoyed the mystery, I can't help but feel that this book was written 'by popular demand' to bring Jill back to Lydmouth when it seems either that she and Richard have moved on from their doomed affair, or at least decided to leave it behind (although I did wonder whether Richard and Edith's youngest daughter Susie was in fact the product of Edith's own 'affair' in the previous book).

I had my suspicions about the murderer (or should I say there were breadcrumbs tossed to the reader) based on a few throwaway comments, but the truth was not something I saw coming.

Also, this is a criticism of all the books in this series, there are some howling spelling and grammatical mistakes which should have been picked up in the last decade since the book was published and I resent paying £3.99 (aka full price) for something which has been edited in such a slap-dash manner.

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