Jake Woodhouse

I am generally wary about coming to a series of novels part way through, preferring to start from the beginning. Of course, jumping in midway can sometimes prove advantageous. After all, I doubt whether I would have bothered to read subsequent instalments in the chronicles of Dalziell and Pascoe if I had started reading that sequence with A Clubbable Woman, the first book in the series, as I found it very weak and unappealing. Fortunately I had leapt in with A Killing Kindness and Exit Lines, which were sufficiently good to make me want to go back to the beginning. In fact, I had a similar escape with Ian Rankin’s books featuring Detective inspector John Rebus. While far better than A Clubbable Woman, I doubt if his first book, Knots and Crosses was sufficiently good to encourage me to read the following books in the canon, and I would, as a consequence, have missed out on some excellent novels,

Before the Dawn is the third novel to feature Dutch copper, Detective Inspector Jaap Rykel, and we soon learn that in previous instalments he had been through the mill, suffering injury and loss of family. While the Netherlands setting may be new, we are in familiar territory, with Rykel being a bit of a maverick and enjoying/enduring a strained relationship with authority in general and his boss in particular.

As the novel opens, Rykel and his boss are present when a suspected serial killer is arrested, although owing to an oversight, the felon is not searched sufficiently rigorously, and is able to draw a gun and shoot himself, in front of the press who had gathered following a tip-off about the arrest from Rykel’s boss. As if this were not embarrassing enough, shortly afterwards another corpse is found showing exactly the same pattern of wounds as identified in the earlier killings, and the first felon has a watertight alibi.

Jake Woodhouse drives the story forward with great verve. He doesn’t delve too deeply into his character’s emotional lives, but they are far from two dimensional. The plot is hectic, with lots of twists, but never strays beyond the plausible.… (altro)

A headless body is found in Amsterdam, then another one. A woman falls in front of train at Central Station. A police detective is addicted to drugs and is supplying information to criminals. Cannabis farm raids are going wrong. What links all these crimes together is the forthcoming trial of a Bosnian war criminal.

This is a fast-moving thriller based in Amsterdam and re-acquainting the reader with a group of characters first appearing in Woodhouse's previous novel. I hadn't read that book but I had no problem getting up to speed as there is enough backstory to support. The plot is complex but very clever and there is a terrific twist at the end. Thoroughly enjoyable.… (altro)

I don't read a lot of hard crime novels because, well,it's just not a genre that appeals greatly to me. This one I picked up as a proof copy from work.
This one has a great deal of promise but I don't feel it reached its potential. I found that while the storyline was complex the characters in it where all massively cliched. They felt like I had read them or watched them on tv a million times. The boss only concerned with how things will reflect on him, the cop with the drug habit, the token female cop who puts up with massively sexist superiors, and of course the jaded hero detective who has a few quirky habits and a traumatic back story. Several things were clearly left hanging at the end of the book and without knowing that it was part of a "quartet" it had that " set up for a series feel to it".
All in all I felt reading it the same way I felt about JK rowling's The Casual Vacancy: the best person in the story and the one I would have most liked to get to know was killed in the first 3 pages. And at the end of the book we learn he still got screwed over.… (altro)

This is a well constructed thriller, particularly considering it is a debut novel. A police procedural set in Amsterdam, but by a new British writer, it clearly shows that there is a fine line between crime and fighting against it, that too often it is easy to cross that line, and that it is hard to know who to trust.

The novel brings together a trio of detectives whom I presume will be the core of the team for the next: all are flawed in their own way but each is well drawn. I thought perhaps the action of the final pages was a bit rushed, but there are plenty of openings for the next in the series… (altro)