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Revision as of 11:29, 16 November 2020
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|title=The Bursar's Wife
|sort= Bursar's Wife
|isbn=978-1785650031
|website=https://twitter.com/eg_rodford
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In many ways George reminded me of Ed Reardon, the pompous and self-deluded hack writer from the BBC Radio 4 comedy ''Ed Reardon's Week'', and that similarity and the lighter tone at the start of the book at least gave him an endearing veneer. George sneers at cheap suits and the smell of cheap aftershave or deodorant on other people, but by all accounts it's the pot calling the kettle black. Given his circumstances, his character and his desperation I was surprised that several younger women were apparently willing to go to bed with him, and that was one of the niggles that meant that despite a reasonably tense plot the book never quite sat comfortably with me.
My other major source of unease was the use (or not) of technology. The time period is never explicitly stated but the fact that everyone except George has a mobile phone, and there are memory sticks, DVDs, Google and broadband made me assume it was contemporary, though it could just as easily be set ten years ago. He uses discreet GPS trackers on vehicles, but there were times when realistically I felt he would have used a mobile phone, or Google Street View (which has been around for seven years now) to scope out a neighbourhood, but then the plot couldn't have advanced as it did. His dislike for and unfamiliarity with technology felt at times like a gimmick and I wonder if the author would have been more at ease setting the book twenty or even thirty years ago to get round around some of the modern shortcuts that overcome difficulties that have traditionally put the lone investigator in danger.
I doubt I'd go out of my way to read the second novel (The Runaway Maid, due out in March 2017) but if I stumbled across it in the library I'd probably give it a go. It would be interesting to see how George developed as a character, and entertaining to get another dose of Cambridge from the dark side.
For something along similar lines but set in Chicago you could try Michael Harvey's The Fifth Floor [[The Fifth Floor by Michael Harvey]] or give a female private detective a visit in Manchester, via one of Cath Staincliffe's Sal Kilkenny mysteries such as Bitter Blue [[Bitter Blue by Cath Staincliffe]]. We also have a review of Rodford's [[The Surgeon's Case: George Kocharyan Mystery 2 by E G Rodford|The Surgeon's Case: George Kocharyan Mystery 2]].
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