Andrew Martin The Blackpool Highflyer

336 page paperback. This is the second 'Jim Stringer - Steam Detective' stories i've read, and having enjoyed the first (review posted), i was quite looking forward to this. The reviews i had read for this book were not so favourable. Having started this book, it was immediately clear that this series of books were not split out from one story, but are individual stories set around our main character and his now wife. For this book the setting has changed from London to Halifax and Blackpool. The book starts very slowly, seemingly accepting the reader has encountered the main character from the first book, as much of his persona seems to have been removed. The plot does start fairly early on, but the author has failed in writing the mystery here, as by thinning out detail, he leaves the story swimming about in the flotsam of heavy scene detail. As i read on hoping for the story to pick up, i was confounded by weather reports, poster adverts, cloth weights and 'wife' stories. It occurred to me that within all this clumsy background writing, we'd missed the most interesting thing to happen to our protagonist, in that he got married to his landlady. This marriage fell between books, i fear partly as he was wary of making the wife character too interesting in comparison to our lead role. I found her to be the only character i could or wanted to empathise with in this book, and I think the fact that she's continually referred to as the wife, further indicates the authors concerns about his weak main character. There were also a couple of chapters were the only mystery element of the plot, was tagged on to the end of the chapter as a couple of one line questions. The biggest problem with this book is it's composition. The main character is poorly written and unbelievable. The story has been stretched by 25 chapters too many, so the reader staggers on through pages of unnecessary infill searching for something of interest. There were passages were there was so little going on, that reading another page felt like having teeth pulled. AAarrgh!So good points. Again there are interesting periodic details, which are having to carry this book which isn't fair on them in this mystery story context. The good news is this book should not interfere with reading more of the series, which hopefully will be better. The best thing you can do with this book is recycle it.