Soft Summer Blood

One of the more tiresome genre clichés is the maverick cop. Peter Helton’s series set in Bristol has two of the blighters – but we’ll forgive him this, as he writes decent page-tuners with a streak of black humour running through.

Helton juggles two quite different but really rather sprightly series, both set around Bath and Bristol. The one featuring artist/PI Chris Honeysett is the quirkier of the pair, but the adventures of DIs Liam McLusky and Kat Fairfield are a smidgen darker.

Trouble follows Liam around, both in his professional and private life – an earlier book had him returning after suspension, and of course his love live is all over the shop as well. He drives a car that costs him more than the national debt of a small country to run, and his accommodation is pretty basic. But hey, it’s convenient for the pubs and takeaways of the city.

In Soft Summer Blood, he’s doing his best to kick his chocolate habit, and is angsting over his annual fitness test. Fortunately, he and Kat appear to have stopped angsting over the same ghastly woman …

McLusky and DS James ‘Jane’ Austin get the high-profile case. Charles Mendenhall is found dead in the grounds of his swanky house just outside Bristol. There’s an obvious suspect with a dodgy alibi – but then another body turns up, and it all gets a sight more complex.

Kat and DS Jack Sorbie are rather miffed to be palmed off with a missing persons case – the daughter of an important Italian politician has gone missing while at university in Bristol. But then they find a body of their own to complicate their case.

The tense ending comes out of leftfield, and then is done and dusted at speed, thanks to a seemingly minor action of Liam’s from earlier in the book (one that had annoyed the hell out of me!)

Soft Summer Blood is a more than competent read, albeit a tad light on the character development, which will keep you out of mischief, even if it’s unlikely to light up the Clifton Suspension Bridge.