Title: The Dark Winter (Goodreads)
Author: David Mark
Series: DS Aector McAvoy #1
Published: Blue Rider Press, 2012
Pages: 304
Genres: Crime
My Copy: ARC from Netgalley

Buy: Amazon, Book Depository (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

Three bodies are in the morgue in Hull, East Yorkshire; each of them a sole survivor of a past tragedy. Someone is playing God, targeting the people who have once cheated death. It is up to Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy to try and stop them. In the depths of The Dark Winter, driven by need for justice will he find himself on the wrong side of the killer’s blade?

Aector McAvoy is an unlikely hero; he is more of an office worker than an investigator and you get the feeling he would more comfortable on a computer working than pushing his weight around as lead detective of this case. He is also appears very compassionate which makes for an interesting situation. The dark gruesome nature of this crime mixed with the ‘niceness’ of the protagonist never really worked for me; it felt like cosy crime trying to break into a noir novel.

There are secrets and complexity to this case that really didn’t translate well in the writing. I can see what the author was trying to do but I never felt like it came across well. There are the twists in the case and I was glad for them because I was often close to abandoning this book as it wasn’t working for me.

While Aector was too compassionate and nice to be a decent protagonist solving these horrific murders, the rest of the characters in the book were too one dimensional that I couldn’t really get a sense of their personalities.

When it came to the plot I think David Mark has some great ideas and with his journalism background he did know how to make these macabre crimes feel realistic, but I felt there were too many hole in the story. Mark has the potential to be a good crime writer, with better character development and more practice in weaving a complex plot together. But in the end this book didn’t work for me, I struggled off and on with the book and in the end had to really force myself to finish it.