Customer Reviews

A Kind of Acquaintance (Frank Kavanagh)

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This is a low cost download from Audible, narrated by Gordon Griffin Griffin is a competent reader-- not much more. Give him an uninspired story and the listener is up to 8 hours and 24 minutes of boredom. I'm not sure why I even listened to the end except I was doing some mindless work and the problems with the story gave me something to think about.

There's a lot going on in this book, and actually some of it had potential to be interesting. But the author kills any interest that the reader might have.

A woman accidentally kills a young boy on a bicycle in a country lane. Instead of reporting the accident she drives off with the body. A well known novelist living alone on a canal disappears from her houseboat. A truck farmer develops a relationship with a Hungarian national originally hired to pick fruit on his farm. A ladder is found suggesting that someone on the farm has been peeping at the female workers while they shower. A reporter sets out on a 200 mile bicycle ride for charity along the canal tow paths. The keeper of a bed and breakfast near the canal who is questioned by the police is found murdered.

1) Way too much extraneous and uninteresting detail. The author seems to be the king of the info dump-- and very little of it pertains to the main plot.

2) The relationship between DI Frank Kavanagh and DC Jane Salt is painfully dull. Even their disagreements about whether or not voyeurism is a crime is dull. As for their discussion about how often they have sex-- please, no, don't go there. I don't want to even think about these two in bed together.

3) The police forensic experts get fingerprints off an old farm ladder and live tree branches, as well as some DNA (what was the DNA on?) from the debris of a 20 year old accident No one actually explains what the DNA came from or how they managed the miracle of finger printing although there's a pretty long exposition near the end about cold cases. I actually thought I had somehow missed the conclusion and was listening to an Afterword by the author.

Dull, dull, dull.