Customer Reviews

Down River

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Stephen Gallagher has always been a favourite of mine. His easy prose style never gets heavy or boring. His dialogue is realistic. But what I like best is his 'heroes' are always ordinary people in extraordinary situations. You really feel for them as they face their trials.
Down river is no different.
The police character of Jennifer appears in a later book, nightmare with angel. The only instance of this in his fiction.
I also love how he evokes the sense of place, especially some of the seedy, desolate places his characters journey to (both in geography and in the mind).
With lots of twists, some obvious, some not at all, it is a pacy satisfying read.
Another winner.

Stephen Gallagher is a very good, although not very well known author. It's extremely hard to come across his books and expensive to obtain them when you do. You're usually rewarded for you time and money with a great read. Unfortunately this is not so with Down River, which has characters you really couldn't care less about, a lot of padding out the pages with boringness when a few short well written (the usual Gallagher way) chapters would have told readers the exact same developments in each section of the plot. The novel starts of well with a flashback chapter of a young version of the main character Nick Frazier blocking a rural isolated road with his bike and convincing a travelling salesman to accompany him to a dead body and insisting the adult tells the police and everyone else that he is the one who found it. Then we come to the present and Nick is nothing like that great interesting child character.

Basic plot Nick Frazier is transferred to a new police jurisdiction as he couldn't handle the attitude of his former colleagues towards him after he did the right thing in his mind and reported a bit of police brutality towards a particularly reprehensible criminal that ended up winning that criminal compensation. In his new Nick , Nick has found romance with a uniformed officer (he's a plainclothed officer) and been partnered up with his old childhood friend Johnny Mays (which is another flaw in this book as it uses the American partner situation which isn't how the British police operate). Johnny makes what his former officers did look like nothing, and he does it all the time, even keeping a little black book where he writes down details on anyone that annoys him so he can get even later. Nick faces the dilemma of if he should report him, ignore it or confront his childhood friend and lay down the law with a good lecture. When a particularly nasty out of control child decides to defecate on the front seat of Nick's car and they set out to get even Johnny assumes Nick finally gets it. Unfortunately Nick's morals kick in and he demands Johnny backs off. A furious Johnny tells Nick he's now on his list too just before their pursuit car has an accident and flies off the wall of the dam. Johnny is presumed dead but his body is never found. As Nick falls apart emotionally he decides to go back to his childhood town and deliver Johnny's possessions to his family and try and figure out learn what happened to Johnny in the time since their childhood that made him the vengeance seeker he became.