Foul play in Hull

It is always interesting to see what happens when a literary novelist turns to genre fiction. Swan Song is the third novel of Robert Edric’s trilogy about Leo Rivers, a private investigator based in modern Hull. The format is instantly familiar because Rivers is a modernised and home-grown Philip Marlowe — detective, knight-errant and laconic narrator — though Rivers lacks both the literary panache and the glamorously self-destructive habits of his original.

Three young women, two of whom dabbled in prostitution, have been murdered. The principal suspect for the most recent murder is the victim’s boyfriend, now in a coma following a drug overdose. As far as the police are concerned, his guilt is not in question — only whether he is responsible for the other murders too; and self-serving officers are happy to bend the truth to further their own careers.