3 out of 4 stars
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In The 11:05 Murders, Detective Sergeant Denise Stewart has recently transferred to Strandtown Police Station in Belfast after receiving a promotion for exposing corruption in her previous post. Working her first murder case alongside her new colleagues, including Detective Chief Inspector Sheehan, she must find the person responsible for the brutal murder of a banker, wading through a pool of suspects including former customers and a loyalist thug-turned-legitimate businessman. How does a crime at Queen’s University twelve years prior factor into the case? Are her former colleagues out to get her? Which of many potential suitors catch her eye? Who is her mystery informant?
With a cast of well-established characters, such as the confident and strong Tom Allen, young star prosecutor Robert Turner and quirky medical examiner Dick Campbell, there are a lot of well-written interactions between them that really give you a sense that these people have been working alongside each other for some time before the book begins. You can easily invest emotionally in some of the characters, making the story all the more engaging. I did feel like there were maybe too many support characters in the police station itself, as during the team debriefs I often lost track of which officer was which and who had done what. The male-female dynamics often felt a bit clichéd and two-dimensional. Stewart found most of the male characters to be good-looking or handsome and almost every male character thought she was stunning and fell for her. Although this is in the Inspector Sheehan series, it felt much more like Sergeant Stewart was the main character and Inspector Sheehan only played a supporting role.
I really enjoyed O’Hare’s writing style. The pacing was good and he made the characters relatable. I found it difficult at times to stop reading and return to my real life commitments, I enjoyed the book so much. I did predict the killer from an early point in the book, but there were enough red herrings and additional suspects to make me doubt my prediction a few times, and it didn’t detract from the pleasure of reading the book. There are many other mystery novels out there that don’t cover the killer’s tracks as well as O’Hare has here, and it would be impossible (or pointless) to make it so that nobody suspects the killer until the end.
The thing I enjoyed least about the book was the use of images at the start of each chapter. These varied from stock photos to drawings, giving the book a rather unprofessional and juvenile feel that contrasted from the mostly well-written story. I got the impression that the book had not being professionally edited because towards the end of the book there were a few errors, for example: “Sheehan eyes narrowed”; “Sheehan eyes closed”; “So I had to leave immediately I heard the news”. I also feel that a professional editor would have picked up on the fact that the words diffident, diffidence and diffidently appeared five times in the first six or seven chapters.
This is the second book in the Inspector Sheehan series, I have not read the first, but now fully intend to, and there is a third on the way. Due to a combination of its compelling plot and well established characters and tone, I would have given this book 3.5 stars out of 4 if that were possible, but due to the need for whole numbers and the fact I don’t believe the book to be professionally edited, I can only give it 3 out of 4 stars. That said, I would still strongly recommend the book to fans of crime and mystery novels as I really enjoyed reading it.
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The 11.05 Murders
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