Reviewed by: Keith Nixon
Genre: Crime
Approximate word count: 75-80,000 words
Availability
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Author:
Matthew
Pink grew up in Cumbria where his debut novel, Scafell is based. Matthew has undertaken a wide variety of jobs
whilst travelling extensively across Europe and Latin America.
You can
learn more about Matthew at his website.
Description:
Stephen
‘Sparky’ Markham has just relocated to Cumbria for a slower pace of life. After
a career in the police and then the army he’s earned it. He’s also trying to
get over a recent family tragedy. Thankfully his best friend and ex-partner
Detective Charlie Slider also lives locally.
But a life
of walking and bird watching is rudely interrupted by the discovery of a
mutilated body and a face from the past.
Appraisal:
This is one
of those books that’s part promise, part frustration. It started well with a
descriptive view of the local area as a backdrop to a local finding a body.
Sparky himself is a troubled protagonist with a blemished background (only at
the end do we determine quite how stained he is). It gives him depth and appeal.
Slider is also intriguing, one of those people who is constant trouble, but you
can’t help but like. We’ve all known them.
There’s
also a degree of topical interest resulting from a company who wish to start
exploration for oil by a fracking process, the owner of which is one Silas
Mourner, who appears to have dubious connections with the criminal fraternity.
But the
problems began to appear. The prose is at times, and in particular during the last
two-thirds of the book, incredibly descriptive. Great if you like this sort of
thing, personally I struggled with it because of the regularity. An example:
…out stepped a tall man in an olive
green plaid suit with a sky blue and tan check, a crisp white shirt and an
orange tie tied with a half-Windsor knot. In his breast pocket was a silk
orange handkerchief which matched the colour of his tie exactly. His shoes were
tan brogues, gleaming with polish and his stride was heel first, confident and
maybe a little over-compensated. His skin was pale and smooth apart from some
burst capillaries underneath his eyes, his face long and angular with an
imposing nose which looked sharply curved in the low light of the pub. His
hair, which was combed tightly and wetly back over his head, was the colour of
sweetened mustard you get in low-grade American-style hot-dog joints.
There were
many descriptions like this, targeted on people and the surrounding area. Again
personally I struggled to put together the vast colour range the guy was
wearing, but critically I felt his dress sense wasn’t relevant to the story –
so why go to the effort?
And
another:
…a can of crimson worms was opened
into the sky’s canvas above me. They were followed by yellow and gold
serpentine strands, electric blue fruits and green semaphores which all rose
and hung in the air for a few glorious seconds in the symmetrical pattern of a
butterfly and then dissolved into stardust.
Having to
stop and read / digest such long descriptive phrases interrupted the story’s
flow, which was generally of a decent pace otherwise. Eventually I just skipped
over these long sentences.
At times
there was too much of a stretch in belief. When Slider goes missing, Chief
Constable Bullman pulls Sparky in to help, the premise being Sparky has aided
Slider in previous cases and Bullman wanted Slider’s disappearance kept quiet.
But this secrecy doesn’t last long and the whole point is lost.
In a final
scene a mystery person pops up in Sparky’s aid, but it’s not explained who this
was (that I could see anyway) which was a degree of frustration.
Finally
there were a number of technical issues, such as spelling mistakes. Sparky has
a Lugar pistol – I think this is supposed to be a Luger (I searched for the
former and couldn’t find a reference). Others included hyperthermia, reneg and
pArtis. There were also incorrect words used – tact instead of tack, breaking
instead of braking. And also some layout aspects such line breaks or blank
pages where there shouldn’t be or extra spaces, say between a speech mark and
the first word spoken. Small, yes, but these jumped out and undermined the
story.
I also
found a couple of paragraphs where the tense changed from past to present which
threw me. Jobs for people that changed over the course of a page – Mourner’s
assistant was a Personal Secretary, then a paragraph she’s later an Executive
Assistant.
In other
cases mangled sentences and then just plain odd ones like:
The beatings had left her with a
fractured wrist, three split lips and a permanently damaged eye socket.
Three split
lips?!
The biggest
error for me was the repeat use of words. This is an aspect I really struggle
with. It was very common for sentences (or successive ones) to have two or even
three of the same words in them, for example:
I shouldn’t bottle it up. At least
that’s what they tell me. But to be honest, bottling it up seems to do me just
fine. Isn’t the problem that you then unbottle it and then empty that bottle
Spark?
And:
‘…a silent
partner in most of these companies, the front man changing from company to
company. Changing, that is, apart from two of the companies…’
‘And before
I had a further chance to interject further…’
‘I was
wearing the same jeans I had been wearing when I arrived.’
In one
relatively short chapter (9.5 pages on my Kindle) I counted 57 uses of ‘you’ or
its derivatives (mainly the former), like:
‘You by
yourself are you?’
Guess what?
I wasn’t properly reading the story as a result and my attention drifted.
It’s a pity
as Scafell had the makings of a reasonable
debut novel. The pace was good, the premise reasonable when it wasn’t over
stretched and when it worked the story held my attention. But it could have
been better. In particular Scafell
would benefit from some hard editing. Ordinarily Scafell would have received three stars, but the litany of issues
unfortunately pushed it down.
Format/Typo Issues:
Many
repeated words, some spelling mistakes and format errors.
Rating: ** Two Stars
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