J. M. Dalgliesh, Divided House and Blacklight (both independently published 2018), 2019 audiobook narrated by Greg Patmore
On long car trips, I used to read while the not-yet–Emerging Artist drove. Now, my vocal cords have lost stamina, we have fallen back on audiobooks. For our recent trip to Brisbane, we picked the first instalment of the Dark Yorkshire series – three novels in all. We managed to listen to two of them. We were under the vague impression that we were about to listen to some P. D. James novels featuring her detective Adam Dalgleish. We were wrong.
J. M. (not Adam) Dalgliesh is evidently one of the top ten best-selling authors on Amazon, and Dark Yorkshire was his first, extremely popular series.
In the first book, Divided House, Detective Inspector Nathaniel Caslin has to deal with dead bodies, a cyber-pornography set-up, corrupt colleagues, distrust from his superiors based on past honourable rule-bending, a curmudgeonly inability to deal with digital media (which makes it a surprise to learn he is only in his thirties), a marriage that is falling apart, and all the tropes of a good crime thriller.
This is the kind of storytelling that is consumed rather than engaged with in any reciprocal way. These days I consume it almost exclusively on screen, and mostly the small screen.
The plot is a bit too convoluted for my travel-weary attention span. Award-winning narrator Greg Patmore does a fine job for the most part, though I would have preferred that he didn’t try so hard to give each of the many characters a different voice, especially the women. It seemed that he was focusing on the women characters’ femininity at the expense of other qualities, by speaking in almost-falsetto. I occasionally had to remind myself that the woman character Caslin finds himself attracted to isn’t written as trans – she just sounds that way.
Caslin is also the hero of the second book, Blacklight. This time he’s dealing with a serial killer, and/or MI5. Not my favourite story type. But he does have a female partner, and once I accepted Greg Patmore’s version of a woman policeman’s voice, her bristly relationship with Caslin added some humour to proceedings.
J. M. Dalgliesh’s website has this to say about his books:
Penned in the style of crime thrillers with a touch of Scandinavian noir, readers who enjoy dark atmospheric mysteries will find his books a must-read.
If you can ignore the image of penned readers conjured up by the syntax of that quote, then these books may be for you.
Me fail? I fly! 