I’ve had good luck with the other books published by Soho Crime so I grabbed a bunch at the Seattle Mystery Bookstore. This was one of them. Garry Disher’s The Dragon Man is a decent, but pedestrian, police procedural. The thing I like best about the previous Soho Crime books is their flavor of the different. This novel is not so different though. It’s set in south Australia in a suburban beach community. Take away some slight language differences and some slight procedural differences from the U.S., and you have a typical American mystery. Suspects don’t get read their Miranda rights here, they get cautioned
. And tires are tyres
. But otherwise, you’ve read this.
And the big problem with this book is the same problem with American mysteries. Huge coincidences tie all the crimes together, so once one of them unravels, all the crimes unravel. The central mystery is who is abducting, raping, and murdering women on a lonely highway at night. The killer taunts police. There are three crimes going on here. The serial killer, a serial arsonist, and a serial theft ring. They may or may not overlap (read to find out). Here’s a bit of a spoiler though. Like Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, the story screams about most of the characters: This one is guilty of something!
. Look for the one that doesn’t have anything screaming that. He’s the real guilty one. I could see it a mile away.
Also, Disher doesn’t stick to one or two points of view. Probably 30 different characters get pieces of the story written from their point of view. It’s too many characters, and there’s no need for them all to get stuff written through their eyes.
Still it does work as basic bubblegum mystery. Worth reading if you see it in the library.
Title: The dragon man
Author: Garry Disher
Series: Detective Inspector Hal Challis book 1
Publisher: Soho
Format: Paperback
Length: 239 p.
Publication date: June 2005
ISBN-10: 1-56947-395-1
Subject: Police — Australia — Melbourne Region (Vic.) — Fiction
Subject: Serial murders — Fiction
Subject: Melbourne Region (Vic.) — Fiction
Subject: Australia — Fiction
LC classification: PR9619.3.D56 D73 2004
