The other day I reviewed Biding My Time, the first novel of Martyn Goodger’s Alan Gadd series. I was highly impressed by the originality of the concept and the quality of the prose.

Having now finished the second book (I don’t think there will be more), I fear I have to dampen my praise a little. Drowning My Sorrows was certainly an original book, but it left me baffled as to the purpose of the whole exercise.

To recap, Alan Gadd is an English lawyer. In the previous book he was working for a large Cambridge law firm. His legal expertise was top-flight, but his utter lack of social skills made him much disliked among his colleagues. His suspicious nature enabled him to detect the fact that a co-worker’s death, apparently a suicide, was in fact murder, and he was nearly killed himself in uncovering the truth. But his methods were so underhanded and cowardly that he got no credit.

As Drowning My Sorrows begins, Alan has lost that job, and is now working in the legal department of a not-very-prestigious university in Cambridgeshire. Once again he regards his colleagues and superiors as inferior to himself. He obsesses over their sexual lives, while feigning moral superiority even as he lusts after a female assistant who’s not interested in him. Once again he is universally disliked by his co-workers.

But part of his job is reviewing university business contracts, and in those he detects some genuine problems. A university-held patent is being sold off to a private corporation at what seems to him an absurdly low price. A superior appears to have granted contracts to personal cronies. Alan’s characteristic response is to set one of his underlings to asking questions, while he himself stalks people and sends anonymous e-mails to get his enemies into trouble. All the while congratulating himself on his ethical superiority.

Then someone gets killed, and once again Alan will find himself facing death.

One weakness of Biding My Time, which I neglected to mention in my review of that book, was a slow start. Author Goodger delights in setting the stage and giving us time to get to know our narrator (I won’t say hero). In this book that problem is even worse – we’re half-way through the story before the murder happens. Frankly, it doesn’t take nearly that long to get one’s fill of Alan Gadd’s company. There were many points when I was ready to drop the book in frustration, and I’m pretty sure a lot of other readers won’t be as patient as I was.

I frequently wondered, as I read, exactly how I was supposed to take the Alan Gadd stories. Sometimes I thought I was taking them too seriously – that they were meant as dark comedies and I was supposed to be laughing as Alan, again and again, falls into pits he has dug for himself through his gormless manipulations. But the ending of this book – admittedly an unexpected one – convinced me that probably wasn’t the purpose. There were moments of sympathy for Alan – we learn that he was bullied as a child and that he had concerned parents who didn’t know how to help him – but he was impossible to like, and difficult to care about.

So, taken all in all, I can’t recommend these books very highly. The author has considerable talent, but I wish he’d put his hand to something more sympathetic.