The best audio crime book I have listened to for some time. Plot, setting and narration come together in an absorbing story which I couldn’t stop listening to. Every spare moment I had, I would tune in and be transported to Adelaide, South Australia, with DCI Jack Hawksworth as he investigates a crime scam which originally involved one of his London university students. He is an attractive character, a man with charisma and morals and, according to the women he meets, sex appeal. Flirtation certainly makes a nice change from grumpy Inspector John Rebus or grouchy private investigator Cormoran Strike.

The premise revolves around illegal trafficking of women’s oocyte (eggs) for IVF and shows three sides; the financial greed, the sadness of childless women, and the unethical way the ovum is obtained and unlawfully shipped around the world. At times I was hoping the details were not too gruesome because I find audio books can seem a bit more graphic when listening to the flow of words. Reading text I can avert eye-danger and skip ahead. Happily this was not the case and I enjoyed listening due to clever scene setting (often tourism info) and Jerome Pride’s skilful dialogue interpretations.

As some reviewers may know, I am against writers writing their novels (no matter what genre) as though they were a film script. Obviously chasing that lucrative yet elusive screenplay offer. They tend to skip over finer details, the ambiance is lost in a blur of speech and hand gestures. In Dead Tide, author Fiona McIntosh has managed to get all senses into play here. She deftly writes the sight, sound, smell, touch, taste (coffee flat white) atmosphere and tense inner monologues which bring together fallout for a courier, pain for a donor, an instable marriage, murder and the many evils of human manipulation.

❤ Gretchen Bernet-Ward  

And the flirtation you ask? See book for details 😉 The coastline setting of South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula and Wallaroo shine. The Wallaroo Jetty is real, as is a ‘dead tide’—see image below.

In my Goodreads reviews, I often add a small quotation which takes my fancy while reading. I always find this difficult with an audio book! Therefore this is an observation not a quotation—I was amused by Jack Hawksworth sitting with a lovely woman as he explained the meaning of the Medieval term ‘short shrift’ (I heard you yawn).

In the audio book, the term ‘short shrift’ is not exactly unknown today but rarely used. I recall my elderly aunt grumbling ‘I’m giving you short shrift, out of my kitchen until dinner time!’ So it means little sympathy and scant attention. I know this because I went to the bookshelves, took down the big old family dictionary and looked it up. I inherited this dictionary, and its frayed spine is held together with aged tape. But, oh, the wonders inside, the little treasures which have been pressed between its pages for over ninety years. Each section, the start of each letter of the alphabet, is embossed on a small indented leather pad to make it easy to find.

There will be no word relics from the 21st century generation. It is hard to muse over an obsolete, battery-dead, glass screened plastic/metallic sender/receiver information disseminator. The ever-changing WWW, internet, wi-fi, digital converters-and-containers of more false and ethereal information than ever recorded in the entire evolution of human history. (See, I just gave modern technology short shrift!) GBW.