Fear and Loathing

Detective Sam Becket is a happy family man, with child psychologist wife Grace and young son Joshua. Someone, though, is bumping off equally happy couples and leaving cryptic notes at the scene for Sam.  And they’re all mixed race marriages.

Meanwhile, Sam’s grown-up daughter Cathy gets a prestigious placement at a restaurant in France. It’s a dream opportunity for her, but someone from her past is stalking her every move. And the restaurant owner has problems of his own.

Fear and Loathing (nothing to do with Hunter S Thompson) reads almost like two books.  In many ways, the Miami police procedural angle is the most readable, although you may feel it necessary to hand your disbelief in at the door at motives and the final reveal. But the murders are genuinely chilling – and Hilary Norman stays the right side of the gross-out factor.

We’re clearly well into an ongoing series, but for new readers like me, there’s not a lot of back story to help us out. And that’s rather a problem when it comes to characterisation, as it’s like being plunged into a party of old friends where you don’t know anyone and the in-jokes and barbed references pass you by. So Sam’s family history, plus any rounding-out of his colleagues is still pretty much a mystery to me.

The French angle is fairly predictable until the end, when it veers into thriller territory – hence why it doesn’t seem much in keeping with the rest of the book.

In its favour, Fear and Loathing is a more than sprightly book that left me genuinely wanting to know who was responsible for the murders. Norman paces a tale well, even if it probably would have benefitted from more time being devoted to the main strand, and the French story left for another book.

I’m not quite sure how I’ve missed Hilary Norman before (I think I had her mixed up with Hilary Bonner!) She’s got more than 20 books under her belt, and I’d be inclined to give any new arrival a chance.