I had an on and off relationship with this book, as a reader. Ted Taylor’s Fatal Decision is the first of a series about a former English police detective enticed out of retirement to lead a cold case unit in the city of Devizes. At the beginning I found it kind of slow; then I warmed to it; but in the end the author lost me.

Gus Freeman is our hero. He retired from the force three years ago, but lost his wife six months later. Since then he’s been kind of rudderless, spending a lot of time on his “allotment” (a patch of ground leased for public gardening).

Then his former superior gives him a call. They want to set up a new cold case unit. Modern police science is quite good at identifying criminals, but their thinking is that, in cases where criminals have sidestepped forensics and computers, good, old-fashioned cop experience and instinct might turn up new clues.

Gus agrees, on a test basis, not convinced he has anything to offer an up-to-date force. He is introduced to his (calculatedly diverse) team of young detectives, and they start by looking into the murder of Daphne Tolliver in 2008. Daphne was a retired postal worker, much liked in her community, whose head was bashed in while she was walking her dog. Gus finds his new team bright and eager, and they soon start learning things earlier detectives missed. It will all end in a major scandal.

At first I found Fatal Decision pretty slow reading. We begin with the lead-up to the murder, but then the author moves to a prolonged segment that just describes Gus’s quiet life as a retired cop. He’s likeable enough, but most authors would prefer to get straight to the mystery and fill the background stuff in as they went along. I suspect a lot of readers will lose patience with this part.

Once Gus goes back to work, things pick up. Author Taylor does a good job with characters. His are layered, and capable of surprising us – something I always like. So I grew more interested.

But a point came when we were informed of one of the characters’ politics. And the moment I read that, I knew with moral certainty who the culprit was, and what their motive was. The author had fallen into a plot trope that was fresh quite a long time ago (like when I was young), but has been used so many times – both on the printed page and on screen – that I can’t imagine every other reader won’t figure it out too. In short, I felt insulted – both as a reader and in my beliefs.

Final evaluation – the book had some virtues, but the slow start and the threadbare “surprise” outweigh them in my estimation. Not recommended.