Just Finished Reading: The River of Fire by Patrick Easter (FP: 2012) [367pp] 

The Thames, London 1799. It was obvious to Captain Tom Pascoe of the Marine Police that the grisly discovery was just the start of things. As soon as a local told him that the boat wasn’t local and had probably come from Hastings the word ‘smuggling’ immediately came to mind. Of course, that just prompted even more questions: what exactly where they smuggling, who killed them, was it a deal that had gone wrong, a falling out between thieves or something darker, deeper? Who was the lone figure seen to leave the river near the sunken lugger, was that really a gunshot heard in the night? So many questions and so few answers. But the river was full of questions and Captain Pascoe only had so many men to chase them down. It was only when his boss informed him that an East Indian fleet was approaching that things started to fall into place. With the Pool crammed to overflowing with ships the greatest danger was of fire. If a fire could be started deliberately it would spread quickly from ship to ship and maybe to the harbour buildings themselves. It would be a tragedy to London and a blessing to the French. It might even knock Britain out of the war – unless Pascoe and his crew can find those responsibly before the match was lit. 

This had the makings of a good tale. The tension was certainly there with a deadline (defined by tides and wind), a resolute and deadly enemy, a well-crafted sense of time and place and an obvious talent for storytelling. But.... Despite all of that I still struggled with this otherwise interesting novel. Characterisation was good (if not better than good) if a little two dimensional at times, the story I thought was overly complex at times and, contradicting myself here, a little too simplistic at others. I thought that there were too many characters involved with too many interweaving backstories. These stories tended to slow down the central narrative and ultimately take tension away from the central investigation. As historical backfilling and providing added context and realism they served a purpose but I thought they were used too often and too intrusively. Two of the subplots in particular somewhat irritated me mostly because they were both largely irrelevant to the main story and could easily have been left out without any negative consequences – the separated siblings sub-plot and the love interest sub-plot. The other thing that irritated me, and honestly at times felt like padding although it might have just been the authors relative inexperience (this was his 2nd book), was the way that the story kept circling back to locations or people to nudge the story along a bit. But probably the most annoying aspect of this book was something that has long annoyed me throughout my reading career – when a character knows something vital to the hero’s ‘quest’, and also know of its value (or at least suspect its value) and yet either forgets to tell them till later (and often at a dramatic moment) or deliberately doesn’t tell them until it's too late because of a bullshit reason. The only purpose of such actions is to slow down the hero and the plot and its bloody obvious why it's happening. That sort of naked plot device just annoys the crap out of me. Saying ALL of that [grin] this wasn’t a bad book per se, it just wasn’t as good as it could have been. Reasonable.