Amazon have been bundling between 5 and 10 police procedurals into a single eBook and selling them off for 99p. There are at least a dozen of these bundles now, each of which gets you a lot of pages for less than a pound but are they worth even that much? Lets try a few and find out, starting with “Death by Carpet”, the first of a seven book pack written by P.F. Ford
We open with a heavy, carpet-wrapped object being thrown into a river (leaving a possibly incriminating piece of string behind) but then immediately forget all of that for almost the rest of the book and follow our sub-title eponymous heroes as they get dumped with a cold missing person case as a potential way to redeem themselves for perceived cock-ups in their (separate) last cases. It soons turns out that a senior officer involved in both of those cases might be involved so not only there is a chance of redemption but also maybe revenge!
From there on in it becomes a fairly straightforward police procedural with all the usual suspects- supportive but harried boss, hacker contact able to perform unexplained technical feats, dangerous but seductive women and all. The cover blurb claims witty banter, which is something of a stretch (I will admit only the “banter”) but the story moves along interestingly enough.
The carpet plays almost no part in the story being mentioned in the prologue and never again. It is not the murder weapon. The string is equally irrelevant.
Overall, a perfectly enjoyable, if undemanding crime story that could almost be churned out on a production line basis by an AI one day. A throwaway novel to pass the time and never read again.