I'm afraid I thought One Man And His Bomb was dreadfully poor. I have never much liked Keating's Inspector Ghote series, but I thought I'd give this a try to see how he dealt with a crime novel set in England. He doesn't deal with it well at all. It is clunky, implausible and, frankly, very poorly written.

The plot revolves around Harriet Martens, a senior police officer in "Birchester". She learns in the first few pages that her twin sons have been caught in a bomb attack in London; one has been killed and one critically injured. Nevertheless, the following day she takes sole responsibility for a hugely important case in which an extremely dangerous experimental herbicide which could devastate British agriculture has been stolen.

The book begins badly and never recovers. It opens with Harriet (Keating apparently cannot decide whether her surname is Pinnick or Martens, by the way) and her husband relaxing in the evening, with dialogue so stilted it is painful. For example, he jokingly refers to her as "the Hard Detective," to which she responds, "I thought we had a pact…you'd never mention that label they put on me back when I was in B Division, stamping on petty crime." This sort of ridiculously clumsy way of conveying her history to the reader carries on throughout, and the dialogue is simply laughable. The whole plot is absurd: a herbicide which has genes which can be manipulated? A senior detective who fails to spot the most obviously concocted story (even if it is concealed within a painfully stereotyped shifty Irishman)? And so on and so on.

It was so bad that I gave up in the end because I simply couldn't bear any more. The set-up, the plot and the writing were all miserably poor and I am amazed that an experienced author like Keating would write something so amateurish. One to avoid.