Writing a story (of any length, but novels are hardest in this respect) presents many challenges, and it’s a surprise any of us ever gets it tolerably right (I’m not saying I get it right myself; that’s for others to determine). You’ve got to cobble together an interesting plot, and then you’ve got to cat-herd your characters into doing the (sometimes outrageous) stuff they need to do in order to keep common sense from breaking out. A story implies unusual activity, and unusual activity usually means forcing characters to do extreme stuff. This can be done well or badly. I felt it was done rather badly in Lewis M. Penry’s One Other, second in his DS Jerome Roberts police procedural series.

Dr. Ben Carr is one-half of a medical practice in the London suburb of Shefford. He’s a family man and football (soccer) coach. Apparently popular with his neighbors – so why did someone stab him to death in his home?

Detective Sergeant Jerome Roberts, along with his superior DI Richard Martin, starts questioning neighbors and friends, and a darker picture of him emerges. Dr. Carr seems to have had his share of enemies – there’s his business partner (whom he’s been blackmailing), and the families of female students he’s been sleeping with. There’s the football mom who threatened him publicly for not putting her son into a game. There’s his own brother, too.

As police pressure increases, the suspects respond violently, turning on one another, and even on themselves. The whole thing erupts in a series of homicides.

And that’s my problem with this book. This isn’t supposed to be grand opera or Shakespearean tragedy. It’s a story about ordinary middle class citizens in a suburb. No doubt they’re all sinners like the rest of us, but (it seems to me) the author overestimates the capacity of the average person for deadly force. Killing another human is the first and most stubborn taboo. It takes serious fear, trauma, or specialized training to get past that taboo. Communities don’t just break out in murder like an epidemic of chickenpox.

One Other fell down, for this reader, in the psychology department. I simply didn’t believe the story.

You may feel differently.