I’m always looking for a mystery writer previously unknown to me who will keep me interested the way dozens of others have in the past. I have devoured all the books of Penny, Morton, Johnson, Hill, Harrod-Eagles, the Harrises (Charlaine, C. S., and Joanne), Hamilton, Griffiths, George, Galbraith, French, Frear, Francis (pere, not fils), Crombie, Crais, Connelly, Bolton, and Atkinson, and that’s only a partial list, some of whom take up two to four pages of book listings in my Goodreads account. In addition to all of these, I have read three to six books by countless other authors, either because that’s all they have written to date, or because I liked the first few but didn’t continue for various reasons. These books include all categories of mystery, from cozy to procedural.

This week I started a new series, and the first book gives me the hope that its promise will lead to another series favorite.

The book is An Accidental Death, by Peter Grainger, and I came across it by chance on Kindle Unlimited. The synopsis made the protagonist, DC Smith, sound likeable, and the book turns out to be something of a hybrid between straight mystery and police procedural, with a controversial lead detective and the rookie newly under his direction poking at a death deemed accidental to see if there is something more to discover. I read it in four sittings, and now have the next three on hold at the public library, which will hopefully cough them up sooner rather than later.

There were parts of it that both intrigued and frustrated me; it seems like the book begins in the middle of a previous story, but it is plainly listed as the first of the series, and no other stand-alone books or other series precede it, so I must assume that the mystery and intrigue of how DC Smith became involved in a police investigation that went “tits up,” as the Brits say, and then came back from leave to continue working despite some fairly heavy pressure on him to retire will be revealed eventually. A few details surface in this book, including the naming of an adversary on the force named Wilson, who was apparently culpable for the mess made of the previous case and is now under a cloud, which he blames on Smith.

The plot involves a young man on a river bank, getting boisterous and drunk with his friends, who jumps into the water in pursuit of a man in a canoe to prank him, and ends up dead. It’s assumed, from where he was found and in what condition, that the death was accidental and attributable to the combination of inebriation and poor judgment, but something sticks out to DC Smith’s superior officer, Reeve, and she asks him to take a look. When he does, his examination reveals a bigger picture that no one in the police was, perhaps, meant to know about, and he gets into fairly deep water himself before it’s resolved.

The storytelling reminds me in some ways of Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’ Bill Slider series, in that the protagonist is a focused and determined detective who resists both bureaucracy and promotion in his determination to keep solving crimes. Both detectives (Bill and DC—his initials as well as his rank) are thoughtful, smart, and also witty. I enjoyed the first book and am anticipating reading the next and having it turn out just as engaging.