The Chemistry of Death is the first novel in Simon Beckett‘s David Hunter Series. It’s a crime novel.

Plot:
Dr David Hunter fled London and his job as a forensic anthropologist after the death of his wife and daughter and went to Manham, a village in Norfolk. He works as a GP there and tries to forget everything that happened. But when a mutilated body is found, his past catches up with him and he finds himself confronted with the poisonous atmosphere of a small town in panic.

The Chemistry of Death adhers strongly to the genre conventions. It’s not badly written and if you like crime novels, you can do worse. But if you want to be surprised, you’ll have to look for a different book.

[SPOILERS]

I should maybe mention that I’m not much of a crime reader. I find most of the books immensly boring – so take my review with a grain of salt. I got this book for my birthday and I was in a general light reading mood, I decided to go for this one.

My problem with most of the crime novels I read are the genre conventions. I want to guess who the bad guy is, but usually, there’s like 3 suspects and I can tell with accuracy of 95% who of these guys the bad one is. In this case, we have the prototype bad guy – violent, disgusting, no redeeming feature whatsoever who we are supposed to suspect, but who isn’t it. Then we have the nice guy who made a mistake in his past, who is just a short diversion and isn’t it either. And then we have the one minor character who gets two or three mentions in passing and doesn’t seem to have any role other than standing around – BINGO! That’s him.
In this case there’s even a fourth guy, who you’d never suspect, except if you’ve read too many genre novels, so you know that in the end, he’s going to stand up from his wheelchair and make the grand finale.

[Of course, genre conventions are not only a problem with crime novels, you can find them anywhere. But my personal threshold for crime novels is really low, for some reason.]

Anyways, this led to me knowing how it’d end about 150 pages before it actually did. But because I heard good things about Simon Beckett, I thought he might still surprise me and kept on reading. Well.

Dr David Hunter is Robert Langdon, only with insects instead of religious imagery. Meaning: He’s annoyingly perfect, women fall over him for reasons nobody but the author knows and he’s generally a pretty badly covered Gary Stu. Except that in this case at least, I don’t have to picture Tom Hanks.

And of course, there’s some Princess Saving and “pretending the princess is dead, but she really isn’t”.

What drove  me personally completely bonkers is that every second chapter ended with a sentence like “Little did I know that I would come to regret this decision” or something of the sort. Foreboding: UR doin it wrong.

If this sounds like the book completely sucked – that isn’t true. It was reasonably well written and fine within its conventions. What Beckett does especially well is the portrayal of the small rural community (though he is far from being as good as Stephen King).

I do think that if you enjoy these kinds of books in general, you’ll enjoy this one. I’m just not the target audience.