The Order of Things

The Order of Things by Graham Hurley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

First off, let me hold my hand up. I am not a fan of police procedurals. I read this book for the Crimes & Thrillers reading group I attend. That said, this book doesn’t always read like a police procedural.
A woman is found brutally murdered in the bedroom of a seaside cottage near Exmouth, owned by a climatology expert who subsequently disappears. D.S. Jimmy Suttle is charged with the investigation, which rapidly stalls until his ex-wife—an investigative journalist who has just had a best-selling book and is now in need of another—begins her own investigation into the victim.
For lovers of police procedurals there should be enough to hold your interest. Short, telegraphic sentences and plenty of talk about the MIR and the like, much of which went straight over my head.
When Hurley writes in detail about the characters, however, all that changes. He’s another writer entirely. He has a very elegant turn of phrase and a knack of making what they say seem real—no easy task when your characters are often experts in their sundry fields. It’s a pity then that I ended up liking none of them, the ex-wife least of all, though I did begin to wonder if she had a bipolar disorder that had gone undiagnosed. Nor was I ultimately convinced by anyone’s motives for their actions. Why did the scientist upsticks and vanish, for instance? Why then come back, and why obfuscate when he did? I suppose I may have missed something key here but, if I did, it was subtly insinuated.
Still it’s very hard to ignore writing this good. Let me quote a description of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major as an example:

“The music was truly divine, the theme picked out on the piano, then gathered up by the soaring strings and warmed by an oboe and a flute. It surged on, music to fly by, music for seagulls, music with no respect for either gravity or pain.”

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