Blurb:

How far would you go?

The murder of a promising footballer, son of Brighton’s highest-ranking police officer, means Detective Superintendent Jo Howe has a complicated and sensitive case on her hands. The situation becomes yet more desperate following devastating blackmail threats.

Howe can trust no one as she tracks the brutal killer in a city balanced on a knife edge of vigilante action and a police force riven with corruption.

Review:

Through blogging, I’ve met a lot of authors who have enlisted Graham Bartlett’s assistance with the police procedural aspects of their novels, so I was interested to see how he would approach his own novel. There is a lot of procedure in Bad For Good, and it did take me some time to get my head around the hierarchy and how all of the characters were connected to each other. However, the author’s experience of large police cases really shines through, and I enjoyed being able to see the operations in more detail than usual in novels in the same genre. Graham Bartlett makes several comments on the politics of policing through the narrative and this adds to the authenticity of the procedural elements.

The protagonist of the series, of which Bad For Good is the first installment, is Joanne Howe. I grew to like Joanne very quickly, and I love how Graham Bartlett explores the sexism within the police force by showing the reader how Joanne finds a balance between her personal and professional life. She’s very intelligent, determined and she doesn’t stand for any nonsense, although she has made mistakes in the past which make her vulnerable. I liked the humanity in her character and I’m looking forward to seeing how her story continues throughout the series.

Graham Bartlett’s description in Bad For Good gives the novel a great sense of place, and although I’m not familiar with the areas of Brighton about which he writes, I did feel as though I was pulled into the story really easily as I could picture everything vividly as it happened.

Bad For Good is not always for the faint hearted and there is often violence. This creates a huge amount of tension and I was on the edge of my seat as Joanne and her team tried to find the people they were looking for. It often felt like a cat and mouse chase and in these scenes, it was very difficult to stop reading. Graham Bartlett is a talented plotter, and he fits so many complex elements and surprises into the story that kept me engaged, particularly in the second half of the novel.

Bad For Good is available from Amazon.