Not up to his Crowner John series by any means. Basically no plot and the characters were not developed to any degree. Am not sure how this even got published.
Thomas F. (hardtack) -
If we all liked the same book, there would only be one book on the shelves. Unlike the other review currently here, I enjoyed this novel. It certainly wasn't the same type of story as the author's "Crowner John" series, which I found fascinating and was "oh, so sorry" to finish. Yet to say there was no plot in this book is like saying there were no plots in James Herriot's "All Creatures Great and Small" series, which so many people loved. Frankly, I read the first two or three books in that series and then abandoned it, as I found it boring. Once again proving, "one man's meat is another man's poison."
In this book Knight depicts how forensic scientists in post-World War II Britain handled cases. For the two protagonists (actually it's a team of four people) they were involved in a lot of cases in this book and you needed to stay alert to keep them separate. Yet I was very interested in seeing how the investigations turned out, and how and what they used to determine how people died. Knight was also teaching us 1950s forensic science and maybe I found it interesting due to my science background. While they were trying to determine the identity of one body, I caught on to Knight's "aside" when one of his characters wondered if there would ever be any way to determine the difference between people so they could identify one individual. Obviously, he was referring to DNA tests which we so casually accept today.
And of course there is a romance sub-plot to the team. I think I've already figured who is going to pair off as a reference was made several times to someone who is not part of the four-person team. I'm looking forward to the next book in this series.
In this book Knight depicts how forensic scientists in post-World War II Britain handled cases. For the two protagonists (actually it's a team of four people) they were involved in a lot of cases in this book and you needed to stay alert to keep them separate. Yet I was very interested in seeing how the investigations turned out, and how and what they used to determine how people died. Knight was also teaching us 1950s forensic science and maybe I found it interesting due to my science background. While they were trying to determine the identity of one body, I caught on to Knight's "aside" when one of his characters wondered if there would ever be any way to determine the difference between people so they could identify one individual. Obviously, he was referring to DNA tests which we so casually accept today.
And of course there is a romance sub-plot to the team. I think I've already figured who is going to pair off as a reference was made several times to someone who is not part of the four-person team. I'm looking forward to the next book in this series.
