Here we have a book that impressed me up till the very end. Keith Nixon’s Dig Two Graves is the first in a series starring Detective Sergeant Solomon Gray in the Thanet area of Kent. I thought I detected echoes of Scandinavian Noir in it.

Sol Gray reminded me a little of Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole – a dysfunctional cop barely holding onto his job. Only Sol doesn’t have the big successes that keep Harry Hole’s career afloat. Sol lost his six-year-old son ten years ago – literally. He took the boy to a carnival and he vanished forever. No trace of him was ever found. Five years after that, his wife committed suicide. He struggles with alcoholism and his colleagues cover for him a lot. But, to be honest, there’s not a lot of crime to solve in their part of England.

Then one day a young man falls to his death from an apartment balcony. It looks like suicide at first, but there are indications he was pushed. It hits Sol hard when someone tells him the boy had looked a lot like him, and he is the right age….

Then an important member of the community is shot to death, and the Thanet police are plunged into their first serial killer case. As clues develop, they all seem to have one common link – Sol himself. He’ll find himself arrested for murder before the whole mystery gets unraveled.

I liked Dig Two Graves quite a lot. The prose was tight and smart, not very quotable but efficient. The characters were vivid, and I cared about them. What disappointed me was the final solution. It seemed to me melodramatic and implausible – but maybe that’s because it intruded on my personal belief set.

This is a God-haunted book – for pete’s sake, it has a character named Jonah Pennance (!). Sol reflects quite a lot, bitterly, on God’s non-existence. The Christian characters seemed sympathetic and decent, so I was looking for some kind of affirmation of faith. Which didn’t come. That’ll teach me to make assumptions.

Still, Dig Two Graves was a well-written mystery that kept me fascinated to the end.