It was shortly after I started reading David J. Gatward’s latest Inspector Grimm book, One Bad Turn, that I recalled my earlier decision to stop reading the series. The writing’s good, and I like Grimm and his team. But the author’s insistence on bringing God (or spirituality) into the books by way of a lesbian vicar just doesn’t work for me.

Having started the book, though, I figured I might as well carry on. Maybe my perception has been altered by my religious intolerance, but I wasn’t entirely happy with this one.

Harry Grimm, you may recall, is a former paratrooper, facially scarred by an IED. Then he became a policeman in Bristol, but now he has been transferred to bucolic Wensleydale in Yorkshire. In the great tradition of English small-town copper stories, though, the troubles of the big city follow him.

In One Bad Turn, Harry is recalled from holiday when a body is found in a house in a nearby town. Though terribly decomposed, the body shows clear signs of having been subjected to torture. And then a claymore mine concealed with the body explodes, killing two crime scene technicians. The dead woman herself is something of a mystery – beautiful, but not well known to her neighbors. Her identity, it turns out, is a false one, and her means of support unknown. Not long after, another torture murder will be discovered, and another mine will explode.

I felt, personally, that One Bad Turn was kind of predictable. It’s a story we’ve run into before, and is objectively a little far-fetched. It’s not a bad book, but I’m going to try to remember not to buy the next Harry Grimm adventure.