My Thoughts:
I love dour and forbidding heroes in crime fighting stories! Also love the humour that this author peppers the story with!

I reckon that the reason DSI Firbank sent Harry up north is not because of the photograph but because of the condition his prisoners came in with. British police just frown on battered prisoners in your custody.

Hopefully, the author will reveal where Richard Askew got his source from in subsequent books in the series. Who is the leak?

There is an element of "stupid" here which I am wilfully ignoring for the reading enjoyment that I got out of this book. Hopefully this will not repeat in subsequent books.

Aubrey Parsons did a very good job indeed in narrating this book. Not only did he made the story come to life, but, he also drove home the humour in it! I also liked the way he gave our hero the gruff and gravely voice. It fits the character to the T!

Quantitative Evaluation:
Story telling quality = 4
Character development = 4
Story itself = 4
Writing Style = 4
Ending = 4
World building = 4.5
Cover art = 3
Pace = (6 hrs and 40 mins listening time)
Plot = 4
Narration = 5

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5 ( )

I liked the character of Harry, and his sense of humour. Once the action moves to Wensleydale, there is a bit of a lull before the pace picks up, and then there are several twists the last 10%. I might try another in this series at some point, although I hope the constant focus on Yorkshire people and ways and foods and so on is toned down a bit. ( )

This is the first in a series set in Yorkshire, England and featuring Detective Chief Inspector Harry Grimm, 40. Harry has a fearsome countenance. His face was “crafted from wounds he’d sustained from an IED when he was in the Parachute Regiment, and then honed over the years into something just short of being hard and horrible enough to make a grown man shit himself.”

Twenty years ago, Harry found his mother dead and 10-year-old brother Ben devastated and unable to recover from it. Ben became dependent on drugs and was now in Bristol Prison. Harry has been looking for their abusive, murderous father ever since, and it is an obsession for him. It is also destroying him, in the words of his boss, Bristol Detective Superintendent Alice Firbank, who sends him to Yorkshire for “secondment.” She wants him to get away, “do a bit of reevaluation, that kind of thing.”

Thus, Harry takes off for “Herriot country,” familiar as the setting for the television series, “All Creatures Great and Small,” which was based on the books by the Yorkshire vet, James Herriot. It had been filmed around Wensleydale and over in nearby Swaledale, and this is where Harry was now headed.

In Wensleydale, Harry meets his new team, the surprisingly competent and affable PCSO (Police Community Support Officer) Jim Metcalfe, PCSO Liz Coates, Detective Sergeant Matt Dinsdale, and Detective Constable Jenny Blades. They are immediately challenged by a case of a missing teenager, 15-year-old Sophie Hodgson. A body is found, but it is someone else. The team must figure out the complicated issue of what happened, who was actually involved, and where was Sophie?

All the while, Harry is adjusting to this new very different setting, a situation that provides comic relief to the grittier aspects of the story.

Evaluation: This is an enjoyable start to a series that I certainly intend to pursue. ( )

This story used the author's experience of moving from Gloucestershire to Wensleydale when he was 8 years old and has created a character, Harry Grimm, who clearly has potential. Despite the slightly cliched backstory, of a maverick detective who is transferred from city (Bristol) to country (Hawes) and finds it an alien environment, it works because of the humour and engaging local characters. I'm looking forward to more Grimm stories! ( )