Fall From Grace – Tim Weaver

Crime Fiction
5*’s

David Raker makes his fifth outing as the Private Investigator that locates missing people, a thorn in the side of the Metropolitan Police because although he normally finds what he is looking for it is done by playing by the rules, but now a member of the force is looking for his help in tracking down her father Leonard Franks.

The trail for Franks is set across Dartmoor where he and his wife Melanie moved to enjoy a retirement in an oasis of calm after years of top level policing in London. David Raker takes the case and sets about putting the meagre clues left behind to work out what had happened to a man who appears to have disappeared into thin air.

I have only read the third book in this series, Vanished, which I awarded five stars, and in the meantime I’d forgotten quite how much I enjoy the quality of Tim Weaver’s writing. As a reader I care about David Raker, the plot is full of twists and turns with danger appearing to lurk around every corner but at no point did I feel that the tale had veered off the path of reality. Don’t get me wrong, as in Vanished there are some characters that you wouldn’t want to meet in broad daylight, let alone on a dark night, but once unravelled their motives are understandable.

Underpinning this book are the secrets kept hidden along with relationships of almost every description: friends, colleagues, partners, parental and sibling and at no point do any of these feel out of place but instead add to the complexity of this novel.

To break up the current investigation into Franks death we are treated to some psych evaluations going back many years, the purpose of these isn’t immediately obvious but even while I was waiting for this to become clear they add to the feeling of menace that threads through this book.

This can be easily read as a stand-alone book, although like me, you may regret not reading the books in order as there was quite a big piece to the story arc that I missed by not reading the fourth book, Chasing the Dead. I am now going back to the beginning to read this set in order, the writing is too clever and too captivating for me to miss out on a single sentence of Tim Weaver’s writing, he has now sealed his position of an author whose books I need to read, no more languishing on the TBR pile.

I want to say an enormous thank you to Penguin Books (UK) for giving me the opportunity to read this book in return for my honest opinion. Fall From Grace was published on 14 August 2014.

David Raker Series in order:

Chasing The Dead
The Dead Tracks
Vanished
Never Coming Back
Fall From Grace