This light-hearted crime novel, the first from renowned TV writer Marcus Barr, combines familiar ingredients to create a pacy, plot-driven tale of off-side detection working against the system. Loss and isolation may seem sombre underlying themes, but they are dealt with in a plausibly light and skilled fashion; the result is a read that bombs along and offers a satisfying twist at the finale.  I predict a hit TV series to rival the long-running Midsomer Murders, of which Barr penned more than a few episodes.

Freshly retired, decently widowed Detective Chief Inspector Nathan Hawk finds himself in middle England, in a picturesque cottage with a rescue dog named Dogge. Four grown-up children who’ve fled to the corners of the earth, a reliance on alcohol and diagnosed Anger Management Disorder complete the picture. The double murder which opens the novel puts Hawk straight back into work mode, much to the anger of the local DI placed on the case. The authority of Hawk’s voice is convincing, as are the details of life in the force; there’s real feeling behind Hawk’s wry assertion that ‘Put all the coppers in Britain together [and] you could compile an encyclopaedia of utterly useless crap’. Barr knows his subject thoroughly and is canny enough to keep the plot formulaic without dropping into pastiche. One such slice of originality is Hawk’s pot-head neighbour, Stefan Merriman, the Cambridge graduate turned window cleaner. Hawk’s anger management device, too, adds an element of refreshing eccentricity and redeems his irrational outbursts of aggression.

However, some of the tricks that might work on screen don’t sit as happily on the page. Seventeen-year-old Hideki Takahashi, Hawk’s Japanese lodger, seems to have been created to bring tokenist otherness to the WASP world of Buckinghamshire. Poor Hideki is credited with ‘oriental inscrutability’, while his involvement in the denouement smacks of Pink Panther-esque implausibility. Hawk himself, whilst an entertaining narrator, sometimes appears to have been dropped into his picturesque cottage without much impact from his past life and the hectic action of the present fails to make him fully three-dimensional. We know how long he has been widowed but not how long he’s been living in the countryside. Also, there are a few slip-ups that his editor should have caught. Dogge is taken for a walk and then completely forgotten about when Hawk visits the first victims’ relatives. And while the blurb has him as ‘gardening for all he’s worth’, zilch mention is made of anything remotely floral; who knows who mows the lawn or waters the plants.

It’s worth bearing in mind, thought, that Nathan Hawk’s page-life is set to be long-lived, as Barr is working on a series of novels in which more of his protagonist’s former working life will doubtless be revealed. These minor quibbles are forgiveable in a novel that offers such satisfaction. Barr is already half-way through no. 3 in the series; I hope he remembers to feed the dog in one of the next ones.