read by John Curless
Some genres work better than others in the audiobook medium.
Crime is one of the best and we are always glad at AudioBooksReview to discover
and encourage new talent. David Mark’s début novel The Dark Winter has justly
won pretty much unanimous praise and is soon to be followed up by a second,
which we eagerly await.
The Dark Winter has all the right hallmarks of a classic in
the making: a solid, believable hero in Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy of
Humberside CID – family man with a moral past that sets him apart from his
colleagues; a well-trodden beat full of local knowledge honed from the writer’s
former career as crime journalist with the Yorkshire Post; a confident series
of tense, well-thought-out plot twists filled by characters that come out of
the page with the deft mention of just a few traits and idiosyncrasies of personality.
In The Dark Winter, the opening is stark, troubling and full
of menace: an elderly fisherman is found murdered at sea. In a Christmas
bedecked church, a young girl - the last surviving member of a family
slaughtered during the conflict in Sierra Leone - is hacked to death with a
machete. A junkie, who fled the burning home where he had set his family
alight, is found torched to death in a dilapidated council house. There is a
madman dispatching survivors in what appears to be the manner they had escaped
death.
Aector McAvoy (no H) of Humberside CID sees more in the
string of killings than do his colleagues, who arrest and charge the first
suspect to come under the radar. McAvoy, always one to go off on his own
hunches, has to dig deeper. It is McAvoy who eventually discovers the truth
and, at great personal risk, goes forth, alone, to prevent further mayhem.
Ingenious and disturbing: a truly terrific début.
* * * * *
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