PROTAGONIST: DI Joe FaradaySETTING: LASERIES: #6 of 6RATING: 3.5There's something about UK police procedurals that is very appealing to many American readers. Perhaps it's the fact that the focus is more on the actual investigation and procedure than in extraneous thrills and chills. Or that in each of these books there is a clear, understandable chain of command; a Detective Inspector in Manchester is likely to have the same responsibilities as a Detective Inspector in the Peak District. Things tend to be black and white and very logical. Obviously, I'm generalizing hugely, but it seems to me that the UK procedural generally has these elements at work.Certainly that is the case for Blood and Honey, the sixth in the Detective Inspector Joe Faraday series. The entire book lays out every aspect of an investigation, from start to finish. Joe is a member of the Major Crimes unit operating out of Portsmouth. He is called out of his territory to investigate a body found on the Isle of Wight. It appears that the victim tumbled off a cliff and somehow severed his head; however, it's entirely possible that he has been a victim of foul play. Faraday narrows down the suspect list and strongly believes that a local business owner is the perpetrator. Unfortunately, he can't link the evidence to the individual and the reader is never sure if the prime suspect is a red herring or the villain.At the same time, one of Faraday's former colleagues, Detective Constable Paul Winter, is involved in an investigation of his own regarding corrupt businessmen. During the course of the investigation, Winter finds himself relating to one of the key participants, a beautiful young upscale prostitute named Maddox. Over a period of time, they become more involved than they should be, particularly in his role as law enforcer. Winter has been lonely for a long time; in addition, he has been experiencing horrible headaches that are getting progressively worse. Maddox is there to support him, even as Winter faces a devastating diagnosis. Unfortunately, I could never accept the Paul and Maddox relationship which made it very difficult for me to flow with this particular narrative thread. It certainly didn't seem ethical for Winter to become intimate with this woman, much less have her use her sexual skills to trap a wrongdoer.Faraday does a good job of building a complex plot as well as multi-layered characters. My main problem with the book had to do with the glacial pacing. Normally, I can read a book in two or three evenings. However, Blood and Honey took me more than a week. I literally could not read ten pages without falling asleep. My husband had a great deal of fun watching this occur after I told him of my dilemma. It's as if the pages of the book were coated with some sort of narcoleptic substance that knocked me out after being exposed to them for several minutes.Faraday is a good and decent policeman, remarkably free of many of the quirks of his fictional peers. He enjoys bird watching and has an excellent relationship with his deaf son. Other than that, he's a man doing his job. Paul Winter, on the other hand, is a pile of warts who goes over the line in his investigations. Blood and Honey is a very realistic portrayal of police work being done by many different kinds of individuals, with perhaps too much meticulous detail to keep the reader engaged.
The sixth DI Joe Faraday and DC Paul Winter mystery begins with a birdwatcher discovering a headless body beneath the cliffs on the Isle of Wight. The male body has obviously been in the water for a while and the grazers of the ocean have taken their toll. Identification of the body with no head and no fingertips proves illusive.DI Joe Faraday and his team investigate the suspicious death. Was the missing head removed as a consequence of some natural calamity in the ocean or did it have human aid in being separated from the body? At length, the post mortem confirms that the head was sawed off, but it is still missing and the police are no closer to putting a name to the body or finding out how it came to be where it was.Then, a break. A young man who drove a delivery van is missing and has been gone for months. His family hasn't been worried because this was typical behavior, but before he disappeared this time, he had had an argument with a volatile ex-soldier who runs the nursing home where his grandmother is housed. The investigative team proceeds on the supposition that the argument may have turned violent and the headless body may be his.Meantime, DC Winter is working on a separate case and sailing close to the wind on rules and regulations as is his wont. His case involves a local businessman and some very high class prostitutes. Winter very quickly finds himself smitten with one of the prostitutes just, as he recalls, the Donald Sutherland character in Klute once was. Complicating Winter's investigation and his personal life is the fact that he is having excruciating, debilitating, and hallucinatory headaches. He suspects the worst and finally drags himself to a doctor to get his suspicions confirmed.As usual, Graham Hurley switches back and forth in the telling between the two investigations. For a while, it seems as if the two might actually converge at some point. He keeps both of the stories moving and kept me interested in the outcome of both. He also engaged my empathies for his characters, particularly for Winter, which has not always been the case in the past. Perhaps the prospect of death rendered that prickly character a little more human.Interestingly, I figured out the mystery of the headless corpse and who the murderer was pretty early on and I kept wanting to shout at the detectives, "It's all about Bosnia!"This was one of the best in this series, highly recommended for fans of police procedurals. But read them in order.
