PAWSON DOES IT AGAIN !
This is the latest of largely self-deprecating author Stuart Pawson's works but also one of his professed favourites. It is also one of his longest,at 433 pages.
When I first encountered Pawson's work LAUGHING BOY involving the amiable but acutely unlucky-in-love DI Charlie Priest I was hooked straight away. Pawson's pace and plots are always fresh, unusual and well-contrived with the murderers never quite being who or how you expect. The Yorkshire settings give the area a good travellers' write up too.
GRIEF ENCOUNTERS seemed to me to be a slight departure from Pawson's previous stories, the main characters being thoroughly selfish and reprehensible, but perhaps their lack of morals are understandable in the greed and graft of Blair's Britain, however, out of the series, this one left me with a teensiest feeling of let-down - although I could not figure out why. After 12 books we know all about the team at Heckley nick, especially Charlie's right-hand man DC Dave "Sparky" Sparkington, his boss Gilbert Wood, and his fellow detectives, "Mad" Maggie Madison and Jeff Caton ,Pawson is not afraid to make Charlie's senior officers the victims or even perpetrators of crime too but normality and identifiable characters are his watchword. Charlie is tenacious in his commitment to his job (as you would expect from all maverick type fictional detectives) yet although he is justly proud of his claim to be the longest serving DI on the force, he is world weary. Pawson gives him pathos as Charlie still hovers with indecision on whether to jack it all in and grab his pension now the Police spend more time on paperwork than on detection.