“Can you describe the two people for me?” Kett asked. “The man and the woman.”
“She was, like, a woman,” he said, concentrating so hard it looked like his head might pop clean off his shoulders. “He was more like, I don’t know, a fella.”
When I reviewed Alex Smith’s first DCI Robert Kett novel, Paper Girls, a few days back, I remarked that while many mystery writers these days go “extreme” with their stories in terms of action and the physical suffering of the protagonists, this book went extreme with the hero’s emotional suffering. Sent to Norfolk for a country break in the wake of the unsolved kidnapping of his wife, Robbie Kett gets involved in a local case. He’s supposed to be decompressing emotionally and spending time with his three little daughters, but he ends up helping to solve the kidnappings of three local girls.
I couldn’t describe the suffering in the second book, Bad Dog, as primarily emotional, though there’s plenty of that. This time out, Kett is still recovering from wounds received in the Paper Girls case, and he goes on to multiple further injuries in this one, enduring with increasingly implausible stoicism (which is not to say that he isn’t suffering inside too, because he definitely is).
A young couple are out walking in the forest when they are attacked by – something. The woman’s body (her husband disappears completely) has been torn up as if by a dog attack – but the teeth marks are human. The locals immediately attribute the killing to “Black Shuck,” a legendary monster said to be a ghostly black hound, kind of like the Hound of the Baskervilles. Kett’s suspicions incline more to some neighbors who seems to be running a dog-fighting ring. But the real solution will be more bizarre than anyone ever dreamed.
Which was kind of my problem with the book. Not only was extreme physical suffering added to Kett’s emotional challenges, but the crime itself kind of pushed the limits of plausibility for me – though maybe I’m just naïve.
However, the author threw in a tantalizing cliffhanger at the end, so I’ll have to get the next book.
I didn’t like Bad Dog as much as Paper Girls. But the characters are still good, and there are very funny moments. And some fair values. Cautions for language and grotesque violence.
