Showing 1-4 out of 4 reviews.

• Eight-year-old Emma Maloney gathered the coins out of her bank, got on a bus by herself, and walked into the Kingston Crescent Police Station hoping just maybe the police could find her dad, just like they'd found her bike that time. And Detective Inspector Joe Faraday finds he is just as determined to get answers for this child who has finally given him a case worth pursuing.<em>Turnstone</em>, the first book in the Detective Inspector Joe Faraday series by Graham Hurley, is about as good as it gets for a police procedural. The characters are fully drawn, the plot is intricate, and the personal lives of DI Faraday and his officers of the Portsmouth CID are realistically crafted to sustain the reader's interest. Faraday, a widower whose deaf adult son has just left the nest, spends his time off birdwatching. Detective Sergeant Cathy Lamb, married to another police officer, is finding domestic life a bit elusive at the moment. Then there is Paul Winter, another member of the CID force, whose ambition and methods Faraday dislikes and distrusts, but even Faraday must admit the man knows how to get results. And then there is The Public, where money and influence have a say in what cases get what resources. Throw in some yacht racing and drug dealing in just the right amounts and you have a five-star story that will leave you looking for the next in this British detective series.

  5.00 out of 5

  jmyers24

• In my opinion, Graham Hurley is currently writing the best crime/police procedural books in Britain, just edging out Mark Billingham and Ian Rankin. His evocation of Portsmouth and its sombre underbelly matches the Oxford of Colin Dexter, and Ian Rankins Edinburgh. In D I Faraday he has created a three dimensional characteur the equal to any fictional detective. I have read this series of novels sporadicaly and rather out of synch. But I will be making every effort to right that!

  4.00 out of 5

  gidders

• I picked this book up some time ago because I'd never heard of this author & I was looking for something new by way of British mysteries. I'm really happy I did. This is one of the better mystery series openers I've read in a while.DI Joe Faraday of the Portsmouth CID is a widower with a deaf, 22-year old son. As with other police departments, the Portsmouth CID is awash in budget cuts, way too much crime on the streets, with not enough people to handle it. As the book opens, a little girl walks into a police station to report her dad missing. But it's a while until Faraday hears about it ... his bosses want him to do damage control with the press, with developers who want to bring foreign investors to the area, and who want the crime level reduced. Basically, he's swamped. So when he begins to look into the little girl's missing father case, he's grateful to be doing some real detective work instead of being a desk jockey. There's just one problem: he wants to devote resources to the missing dad case, convinced it's murder, but there's no body to prove his theory so, and he's being pressured by the people upstairs to drop it. However, he's so convinced that there's foul play involved that he takes the case on anyway. The writing is very good and the characters come across as realistic, especially those people with whom Faraday works. The storylines also work well together, and Hurley doesn't get bogged down in one to the point where the others don't get fully explored. I'd definitely recommend it to readers who enjoy a good British police procedural and people who enjoy British mysteries. It's not a cozy so definitely don't go here if that's what you're looking for. All in all, a fine series opener and good read.

  4.00 out of 5

  bcquinnsmom

• reasonable procedural, based in a southern city that rarely gets used as a fictional backfrop, and where (in this story at least), there is a wide gap between the haves and have nots.I'm assuming from the story that that this is not the first in this line, and Hurley makes a reasonable stab between the "I'm going to assume you've read everything and therefore tell you nothing", and "I'll tell you everything on the assumption you've read nothing".There are some threads that didn't get tied up at the end to complete satisfaction - the journalist with something to prove against the police, Winter's bully-boy attempt to pull in the snitch with disastrous consequences, the son's defection to France was neatly pulled together in less than a paragraph in the epilogue.....I dont know if this was to leave things open for another book or what........

  out of 5

  nordie

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