Billed as the start of a new series, I can only hope it turns out to be a long one
I like my main characters to have a bit of grit. Detective Sergeant Regan Carter has a whole quarry.
A fiery red head, who has just been transferred to her nightmare job by the husband she’s just divorced, Regan hates dead bodies. She hates the smells, the body fluids, the injuries, the fact that they fart and belch when the trapped gases get released, in fact there is nothing about them she can get along with.
So as a piece of revenge, the worst thing that her nearly ex-husband could do, would be to get her transferred to one of the busiest murder teams in the country.
Just to put the icing on the cake she is replacing a woman that was dearly loved by her team and who died in a freak accident, with everybody presuming that one of the existing DCs on the team would get her post.
Regan Carter, yes she is named after the two main characters in the 1970s TV series The Sweeney, has a mouth that would match Gene Hunt, from another famous series and has an attitude to match, so making friends is not at the top of her list when she arrives at the new team.
Neither is getting involved with a complicated murder based around the drug scene in Leeds.
What follows is one of the best introductions to a new series I’ve read in a very long time.
A seemingly random shooting of a woman, her child taken in his pram, is Carters introduction to her new job.
But is it as random as it seems. Carter is the epitome of a “Dog with a Bone” and in her brash manner manages to annoy both her bosses, her peers, and the local villains.
In the real world she would undoubtedly be sacked, but in the none woke world of crime fiction, she is a breath of fresh air.
A bit like real world policing there are times in this book when a wry grin cannot be avoided. It’s the only way to deal with the horrors the detectives, and the readers, encounter, and in this book there is one very imaginative, and gory, way of killing.
I really hope this series is a long runner, because there is some entertaining mileage in Regan Carter.
Publisher: The Ink Foundry. Pages: 415. Available now
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