Review: Dead Wrong (Calladine & Bayliss #1) by Helen H. Durrant

Print Length: 197 pages

Publisher: Joffe Press (July 3, 2015)

From Goodreads.com:  A bag of severed fingers is found in the playground by a rough housing estate

Police partners, D.I. Calladine and D.S. Ruth Bayliss race against time to track down a killer before the whole area erupts in violence. Their boss thinks it’s all down to drug lord Ray Fallon, but Calladine’s instincts say something far nastier is happening on the Hobfield housing estate.

Can this duo track down the murderer before anyone else dies and before the press publicize the gruesome crimes? Detectives Calladine and Bayliss are led on a trail which gets dangerously close to home. In a thrilling finale they race against time to rescue someone very close to Calladine’s heart.

                                                         *******************

My Rating: 3 stars out of 5

FINALLY, I have gotten around to seeing where it all began with book number one in a series I have been following for some time now. 

I do have a question though - why do people get books that the blurb starts off with a bag of severed fingers is found, and then complain it's too violent? What did they expect? I'm honestly curious as to the thought process behind this. And it's not only this book I have seen reviews of this nature popping up, but others as well and most (if not all) of them give some indication that the novels are NOT about petting puppies. 

*ahem*

Back to this story. 

There were a few things that felt very unrealistic to me - for example, a cop who has empty beer cans on his desk at the station? Not very likely. A criminal with a tracking anklet goes missing and the cops don't pull his tracking data to see where he is? Again not very likely. 

I was also a little confused at first by the time jump. We see a scene playing out at a school, and then it jumps to the killer and his first victims. At first, I thought this was happening as a direct result of the prior scene, but as the book progresses, we find out that that first scene actually happened years prior.

And don't get me started on Calladine. Thankfully, as the series progresses he does get slightly better about not being such a misogynistic jerk, but this book was hard. He seems to define females by their looks (for example his Sergeant Ruth would be better looking if she lost weight and wore makeup, his on-again, off-again girlfriend Monika isn't as appealing to him anymore because she has aged in his eyes, things like that). I also don't see where his hunches were of much use - most of this novel was down to the work of the various other members of his team. Had this been the first novel in this series I had read, I might not have read the others, or at least not read them right away. 

However, when I look at this series as a whole, I can see where there is a lot of repetition in certain things. And seriously, how many corrupt people are there in such a small area? However, I won't let that deter me from finishing the last few books in this series that I haven't yet read. 

                                                              *******************

                               
                                       Dead Wrong is available from Amazon.com
                                      (for free if you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited)