I have read this guy before, with slightly mixed feelings, but heard him on the radio so gave him another try. Can’t really make my mind up – this was quite good but not brilliant.
Tom Thorne, the detective and central figure, makes a wrong but nearly correct assumption about the perpetrator of a very medically obscure (to me) crime, trying to asphyxiate a female victim to the point where she is left in a coma but not dead (Why?), he sees deaths as a failure. The plotting is OK – Thorne is having an affair with a doctor who is also an ex partner of his suspect and treating the only success of the killers attacks. At the end, having unmasked the true perpetrator, they have to switch off the life support for this woman. 20th century prose a lot quicker to read than Dickens.
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