Review: WATER'S EDGE, G. R. Jordan

• 
  A Highlands and Islands Detective Thriller (Highlands & Islands Detective Book 1)
  
• This edition on Kindle (Amazon)
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07ZXMK347
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Carpetless Publishing (December 1, 2019)
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 167 pages 

Synopsis (Amazon)

A body discovered by the rocks. A broken detective returns to a scene of past tragedy. Will the pain of the past prevent him from seeing the present?

Detective Inspector Macleod returns to his island home twenty years after the painful loss of his wife. With a disposition forged in strong religious conservatism, he must bond with his new partner, the free spirited and upcoming female star of the force, to seek the killer of a young woman and shine a light on the evil beneath the surface. To do so, he must once again stand in the place where he lost everything. Only at the water’s edge, will everything be made new.

The rising tide brings all things to the surface. 

My take

This is the first novel in a Kindle boxed set of 5. Inspector Seoras Macleod's usual partner is unavailable and he has been assigned a young woman, Hope McGrath, as his sergeant. Macleod is unused to working with women, and he secretly believes Homicide is no job for a woman. He find Hope brash and unconventional; he thinks she flaunts her body a bit; but comes to admire other qualities.

The case takes them to Stornaway and there are many aspects of the case that makes him uncomfortable. He struggles to come to terms with his new partner and particularly with the fact that she is a woman who can take physical punishment almost better than he does. Stornaway was once home for Macleod and it was where his wife died twenty years before. Much about McGrath reminds him of his wife and what he lost when she died.

An interesting plot full of challenging ideas. I enjoyed it enough to read the second in the set.

My rating: 4.5

About the author

GR Jordan is a self-published author who finally decided at forty that in order to have an enjoyable lifestyle, his creative beast within would have to be unleashed. His books mirror that conflict in life where acts of decency contend with self-promotion, goodness stares in horror at evil and kindness blind-sides us when we are at our worst. Corrupting our world with his parade of wondrous and horrific characters, he highlights everyday tensions with fresh eyes whilst taking his methodical, intelligent mainstays on a roller-coaster ride of dilemmas, all the while suffering the banter of their provocative sidekicks.

A graduate of Loughborough University where he masqueraded as a chemical engineer but ultimately played American football, GR Jordan worked at changing the shape of cereal flakes and pulled a pallet truck for a living. Watching vegetables freeze at -40'C was another career highlight and he was also one of the Scottish Highlands' "blind" air traffic controllers. Having flirted with most places in the UK, he is now based in the Isle of Lewis in Scotland where his free time is spent between raising a young family with his wife, writing, figuring out how to work a loom and caring for a small flock of chickens. Luckily his writing is influenced by his varied work and life experience as the chickens have not been the poetical inspiration he had hoped for!