Review: Inspector French and Sir John Magill’s Last Journey

Inspector French and Sir John Magill’s Last Journey by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Crofts always writes a clever, twisty plot, and French is a solid toiler with flashes of brilliance who has just enough personality to qualify as a character, rather than the crime-solving plot device he was in the first couple of books. Mrs French is mentioned a couple of times in this book, but never appears.

At the 13% mark, I already had a theory about who had committed the crime and how. That theory proved to be correct as far as it went, though very incomplete, and I didn't know why they'd committed it. Watching French unravel the complicated plot in his dogged way was mostly enjoyable, though occasionally I felt some of the tedium that he himself was feeling. Mostly, the author skips over the tedious police-procedure parts with summary, and only gives us fully developed scenes when French's perseverance (or a credible stroke of luck favouring the prepared mind) yields progress. As always, the sense of place is well conveyed, particularly since many of the scenes are in Northern Ireland, which is where the author grew up. And, as is the tradition with the French books, there's a tense scene at the end when French and his colleagues make the arrest and are vigorously resisted.

The HarperCollins edition is a typical low-effort production that's been run through scanning and OCR and then pushed out without adequate (or, perhaps, any) proofreading for scan errors. There are multiple missing, inserted, misplaced or substituted punctuation marks, and a couple of typos that, if someone had bothered to run a spell check, would have been caught. I read the ebook from my library, but I assume the paperback is just as bad. If you have the option, don't buy this edition; it will only encourage the publisher in their lack of professionalism, plus it's annoying to read.

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