Police partners, D.I. Calladine and D.S. Ruth Bayliss race against time to track down a killer before the whole area erupts in violence. Their boss thinks it’s all down to drug lord Ray Fallon, but Calladine’s instincts say something far nastier is happening on the Hobfield housing estate.

Can this duo track down the murderer before anyone else dies and before the press publicize the gruesome crimes? Detectives Calladine and Bayliss are led on a trail which gets dangerously close to home. In a thrilling finale they race against time to rescue someone very close to Calladine’s heart.

An entertaining but sometimes rather grisly English police procedural that kept my interest but never distinguished itself.

The story is set in a small town in the Pennines, the hills that sit between Manchester and Sheffield. It’s not one of those cute, gentrified, slightly-too-big-to-be-a-village-anymore kind of small town used in picturesque BritBox TV detective series. It’s the kind of small town that went into decline when Thatcher took all the jobs away and then had the soul sucked out of it when town planners added a densely packed, badly built. poorly maintained towerblock-infested, socially stigmatised ‘housing estate’ into which they dumped the poorest and most vulnerable people and left them to rot.

The plot centres on the hunt for someone who is abducting, torturing, mutilating and murdering local drug dealers and then leaving plastic bags filled with their body parts in public places where they are sure to be found.

The violence in the book is graphic, detailed, inventive and fairly frequent. This is NOT a cosy mystery.

It seemed to me that ‘Dead Wrong‘ had been configured from a standard set of British Police Procedural tropes and accurate but unsurprising ‘It’s-grim-up-North’ social settings. The plot was clever enough to keep me guessing and the pace was tense enough to keep me listening but this was definitely the fast food version a police procedural.

‘Dead Wrong’ is the first in a series featuring DI Calladine and DS Bayliss. Their partnership and their respective backstories provide about half the content of the book. It seems that they are meant to be the reason for wanting to read the series. focused around a DI in his fifties who has worked in the same town all his life, will rise no further in the ranks although he’s dedicated to his job and his team. He was married and divorced by the time he was twenty-one. He lacks the ability and perhaps the motivation to sustain a social life outside work. At work, he’s a bit of a loner, he has a loyal team and a new boss who he doesn’t respect. I know, it all sounds a little familiar doesn’t it? But Helen Durrant managed to breathe life into it.

I listened to the whole book in a day and it kept me entertained throughout, even though the violence caught me by surprise and some of the clichés had me rolling my eyes. I mean, who ends a gritty novel with DI sitting alone, mulling over his life and finishing with, “Tomorrow is another day.”?

Still, I may come back to this series the next time I want some unchallenging entertainment to engage with while I’m on a long drive.