Let me tell you the provenance of this book. I was planning to go to Bali for a short holiday and as I was browsing round a book shop in Kuala Lumpur I came across this book, Inspector Singh Investigates ... I bought it!

The background to this story, set in Bali, is the heinous Bali bombing of a few years ago. Whilst there are doubtless many books on bombs and bombing and the modern extremist connections, this is the first novel I have read on such a topic.

The eponymous Inspector Singh is a detective from Singapore who was sent to Bali by his department to investigate the bombing. On arrival, Singh finds himself among a large team of local and foreign detectives and othre policemen from Bali and Australia among others. He is not sure why he is there and is unsure of what he might do there since the proper investigation enquiry is well under way and seems to be under control.

A young Australian police woman, Browyn Taylor, joins Singh and they become a team.

There are really three threads to this story:

• the Bali bombing
• a proposed second Bali bombing
• a murder

The Bali bombing is, so to speak, straightforward: it really happened and a lot of people were murdered in an instant in one of the kind of cowardly attacks that bombers are wont to carry out. In a fair fight, those deadly people who flick the detonator switch might beat one person, two people using fists and sticks and goodness knows what. But beating hundreds and killing them all, in a fair fight, no! That's why these things are cowardly because the odds are stacked very heavily in favour of the sneaky, cowardly, inadequate people.

The bombing suddenly becomes of prime importance to Singh and Bronwyn when a pathologist discovers a fragment of a human skull amongst all of the debris from the bombing and in the middle of that fragment is a bullet hole. Oh!

We are then treated to a series of Bali criss crossings as our two detective heroes set off in search of victim and perpetrator. The victim is found reasonably quickly and his wife and friends are all interviewed. Since this is a detective novel, it should come as no surprise that there were tensions in the victim's marriage and there were tension within his expatriate coterie of friends.

The tensions are unravelled one by one and what seems to be THE key piece of evidence or information collapses in a heap.

However, the various major threads woven into the novel begin to surface and it would be remiss of me to reveal any of them without giving away almost everything you need to learn about as the story unravels.

Suffice it to say, the story is interesting and the new threads contain various interesting elements that probably no one will have anticipated.

I liked to read about the various bit of Bali that I was looking forward to visiting but a detached retina out paid to that visit ... I WILL get there, just not yet! I thought the story and the characterisations were very well put together. My only complaint, that might not affect you at all, only surfaced when I started to read my next novel (Target by Simon Kernick: click here for my review of that book). This Inspector Singh novel is a pedestrian read, I did find the going a bit slow ... but it really was only when I started reading Target and the pace of that story smashed me squarely between the eyes!

I liked this Inspector Singh novel and do recommend it but I think you will need to put the fizz into it yourself rather than waiting for Flint to drag you along at more than 10 miles per hour. Finally, this is the second Singh novel and there are more but I am not sure I will look out for the others in the series. Having said that, you will need to get into his character and characterisation more than I wanted to feel the need to read more.

Duncan Williamson
5^th March 2010