Antonio Hill is a superb novelist, and this is a lot more than a police procedural. He writes with great depth and empathy, and some of the set piece encounters between his characters are beautifully written; he certainly gets inside his characters, and allows us to see more of them than most crime writers. . The lack of the fifth star is because the police procedural aspects are sketchy, and maybe there are too many characters, although many of them are interesting and well delineated; the middle of the book starts to drag slightly. A great holiday read.