Yorkshire, testosterone-poisoned, international-crime-and-mystery, interpersonal-problems, intolerance, first-in-series, thriller, crime-fiction, egoist, murder, murder-investigation, unputdownable, trafficking, tragedy, grief, grieving, teamwork, procedural, suspense, punny, banter, friction, friendship, frustration, law-enforcement, relationship-issues, relationships, small-town, rural*****

After finishing #15 read to me by the robot (it's a vision thing), I was delighted to see that the first in series was available by a real professional narrator as this series is new to me.
This case is a little too close to reality and begins with a skull instead of a fish hooked by an angler in a cold mountain lake. That leads to discoveries of murder, human trafficking and more on an international scale. Interesting to meet the characters and to see the changes time brought to the team. Very good start!
It's a great read with all sorts of twists, red herrings, and awful puns.
John Lee is an amazing audio narrator/voice actor! ( )

This really isn't as bad as some of my fellow reviewers are making out; but it's not as brilliant as others are saying, either.

Kitson has got hold of a gripping starting point, and he does spin a good yarn. As the police procedural progresses, this is a real page-turner: you do want to know what happens next. True, the investigation does descend into a rather silly James Bond-style shoot-em-up towards the end, but I think Kitson does it well enough.

However ... let's be honest, and admit that Kitson just can't do

] jokes - heavy handed at best
] romance - just embarrassing
] dialogue - partially solved by having a fair number of foreign characters, whose weird English can thus be explained away (though I'm not sure this is entirely valid!)

Making allowances for the above, there are things to enjoy here ( )