OVERKILL - Vanda Symon

We've got this little dog... Jedda is a 3 year old Australian terrier female.  She's short, red-golden haired, extremely independent, determined to the point of obsession, friendly but can switch quickly into extreme bolshie and she is absolutely and utterly incapable of stepping away from an argument.  She's the sort of dog that will continue the fight after she's been physically picked up and carried away from the conflict point.  I suspect if I'd read OVERKILL before we'd got that dog, there would have been a strong case put for naming her Sam.

OVERKILL is written from Sam's viewpoint.  Which is a tricky approach as the reader is going to have to like Sam, or at least feel some sense of connection with her, and be comfortable that Sam is fairly investigating this death.  Which is complicated because the grief-stricken widower is Sam's ex-lover.  Somebody that you'd have to be dead or thick not have noticed Sam still holds quite a torch for.  That, and some really ... well let's go with naive rather than stupid actions, means it's not a big step for the powers that be to suspend Sam from the investigation because she's made herself more than suspicious.  Perhaps a little unfairly as it was Sam that first wonders if this death wasn't more than a tragic suicide and it's her sniffing around that finds the forged prescription that triggers the murder enquiry in the first place.

Needless to say, a piddling little technicality like "suspicion" and "suspended" isn't going to stop Sam, anymore than a cow manure shampoo or a few stitches in the head.   (And that's got to be one of the funniest scenes I've read in years - thinking about it still made me cry with laughter when we were changing our own ute tyre the other day!)

Whilst there's always the exception to the rule, in the main there are some elements that are kind of expected in some forms of Crime Fiction.  With your cop protagonist it doesn't hurt that they are a bit of a self-starter.  It works well if there's conflict with higher authorities, and suspension allows your cop to head off into somewhat tricky "procedural" territory.  There's really nothing wrong with using some formulaic elements in a book provided that they aren't one-dimensional and there's enough other elements for a reader to identify with to allow you to forgive the occasional blatant setup.  Where OVERKILL compensates in spades is in the main characters.  Sam and her best friend, housemate Maggie are a good pairing - whilst Maggie takes no active part in the investigation part of the novel, she's the calm in Sam's chaos.  And the affection, sarcasm, pithy commentary and observations between the two of them are frequently very very touching and funny.

Part of what I really liked about these books was that sense of humour.  Frequently self-deprecating, the humorous touches are part of what makes the first-person voice work.  At no stage is Sam overbearingly smug or self-serving.  She's flawed and human and probably harder on herself than anybody around her could ever hope to be.  OVERKILL is the first book in what is now a 4 book series, and having read the next two before I went back to re-read this one, I can see the developmental elements in this debut.  Every series, after all, has to start somewhere and there's nothing worse than a debut book that says and does it all.  Sam has places to go, people to annoy, problems to solve, ladders to climb, snakes to slide back down again.  You just have to hope that 4 books isn't the end and there's a lot more of Sam in the future.  (Expect a flurry of these reviews - I've been slack and need to catch up with talking about this terrific series!)