Haggard Hawk is the first in this modern murder mystery in the classic English style. Hawk is a witty and volcanic English ex-copper with four grown up children scattered across the world. He was ‘required to retire’, as the British so delicately put it. In truth he was sacked. And just as he’s about to go mad with boredom one of his neighbours does him the courtesy of being murdered. The local …
The local police warn Hawk against interfering in their inquiry, but he can’t help himself and pretty soon he’s back where he belongs – catching a killer.
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Enjoyed it very much, but need to read it a second time, sometime in the future to get a better feel for the book.
Great plot
not accurate from a military stand point
Good read
The writing is first-class. Hawk and his family are believable, engaging characters. Lots of other interesting characters, but maybe a little difficult sometimes to remember who’s who if you’re not paying close attention to names. Plotting is excellent.
Great read. The setting in England was a nice change for me from the Middle East and US thrillers.
Enjoyable characters and setting. It does seem to drag at points but is worth pushing through.
This was the first Nathan Hawk book I’ve read and I found it enjoyable from beginning to end. Although Hawk has his shortcomings, he has one thing a lot of angst driven crime-solvers lack: a sense of humor. He also tries to improve himself and his portable anger-management map attests. Hawk is also amazingly normal in an unpretentious way. True, he’s lost a spouse. But any reader knows this is a time-proven way to clear the path for romance or set the protagonist of the road to vengeance. (Hawk opts for the former, not the latter.) . But he also has 4 kids he adores who spread out all over the world. They keep in touch via those brief emails for which 20-somethings are notorious. that will bring a smile to ever parents’ face. He lives with a teenage Japanese student and his dog (named Dogge) in a old village cottage named after a tree in a group of cottages all bearing tree names.
But the reader soon discovers that their residents are connected by events much more complex and sometimes brutal than that.
Final kudos to the author for supplying a genuinely surprising ending. No, not the sudden appearance of some long lost relative or the madman living under the front porch. A villain who elicited an impolite “WTF’, followed by the realization that I been fooled right until the very end, even though the evidence was there. We avid mystery-readers long to be humbled like that.