I met the lovely Graham Bartlett at a writing event this year where we were both teaching. Graham is a former police detective and now writes crime fiction, as well as acting as a police advisor to authors and TV writers. If you need help with your police procedurals or any element of crime fiction, he’s your man. You’ll find his website here. Graham has also written two non-fiction books with the well-known crime writer Peter James, who created the Grace series.
I’d been wanting to read Graham’s fiction series for a while, after hearing good things about it. Well, he is a Sunday Times bestselling crime writer. He now has three books in the Jo Howe series, so I started at the beginning with the first, Bad for Good. Here’s the blurb:
How far would you go?
The murder of a promising footballer, son of Brighton’s highest-ranking police officer, means Detective Superintendent Jo Howe has a complicated and sensitive case on her hands. The situation becomes yet more desperate following devastating blackmail threats.
Howe can trust no one as she tracks the brutal killer in a city balanced on a knife edge of vigilante action and a police force riven with corruption.
My review
To be honest, although I’d been looking forward to reading Graham’s book, I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a bit dry. After all, Graham was once a serving policeman, so would it be full of jargon and lots of incidental detail that slowed the pace? The answer is a resounding no.
There are number of different characters to get used to at the beginning, but once you’ve got a feel for them, you care how things turn out for them. In some cases, there seems no way out, which kept me riveted. I felt compelled to read on to discover their fate.
There’s plenty of action, exciting story threads and sudden twists I didn’t see coming. Talk about building tension and conflict.
It’s a great debut and I’m looking forward to reading more in the series.
Esther Chilton 
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