Book info

• Title As the Crow Flies
• Author Damien Boyd
• Year 2013
• Genre Mystery

Rock climbers can’t afford to make careless mistakes. But Detective Inspector Nick Dixon’s former climbing partner, Jake Fayter, died doing just that. Or so it seems. Dixon suspects foul play, but his only leads are unreliable accounts of something odd happening in Cheddar Gorge seconds before Jake fell. The more Dixon learns about Jake’s life, the more he realises that Jake hadn’t been quite the man he remembered... and a lot of people could have wanted him dead. Once Dixon gets too close to the truth, those people will emerge from the shadows and kill to protect their secrets. As the body count rises, Dixon bends the rules to breaking point to lure out a killer and unravel a conspiracy of silence that will rock the sleepy town of Burnham-on-Sea to its core.

Thoughts

I picked this book up after doing just a little bit of research about Cheddar Gorge and finding some detective fiction based around the Somerset area. It’s an interesting story, a little bit too much detail on the rock climbing which went totally over my head, but otherwise a good murder mystery.

I think the clues to the whodunit part were a little obvious, I definitely guessed who it was before the end, but it was still a fun read as we journeyed towards the answers - and there was still a twist before the story was concluded.

Turns out this is the first book in a series based in the same geographical location so I’ll be interested to check out the second book as well.

Rating: 3 / 5