Sebastian Synard doesn’t want any more trouble than he already has. But when he leads a group of tourists along the cliffs of St. John’s harbour, one of them ends up dead. Not only is there a murderer in his tour group, but the cop assigned to the case is sleeping with Sebastian’s ex-wife. It seems like things can’t get any worse, but as he’s enlisted to help flush out the perpetrator, the trail leads deeper than expected, and Sebastian finds himself on the edge.

I’d hoped that the Sebastian Synard books would give me another Canadian crime series to follow. I also wanted to use it for the Mysterious Mountains square in this year’s Halloween Bingo. Sadly, neither of those things worked out. Some of that is down to the book. A lot of it is down to my intolerance for men like Sebastian Synard.

The first two chapters of the book, spent establishing Sebastian Synard’s background (ex-teacher forced to resign for the way he treated a misbehaving child), character (irascible, self-pitying, self-indulgent), family situation (divorced and unhappy about it. Trying to connect with his teenage son but not sure how to do it), his passions (whiskey, food, local history) and his occupation (running a tour guide business leading small parties around Newfoundland), didn’t work well for me.

I thought I could see what Kevin Major was trying to do, but I didn’t like how he did it. The story was told from Sebastian’s point of view, which could have been fine, but his internal monologue was delivered in a brusque staccato that I found disjointed to the point of being annoying. It didn’t help that I found Sebastian hard to like. He came across as smug, complacent and a bit up himself.

I read on because the first body had just been discovered, and I thought things would pick up as the investigation got underway.

The writing did get better, or at least, less disjointed, but by the twenty-five per cent mark, I had made my mind up to set the book aside. I was reluctant to do this so early because it meant I couldn’t use the book to claim a Halloween Bingo square, but I just couldn’t bring myself to spend more time with Sebastian Synard. The man pressed too many of my buttons. I’m disdainful of his passions, his attitude to women, his inability to control his anger and his complete lack of introspection. That probably means he’s well-written. It also meant that when he was stupid enough to hang on to the dead man’s iPhone and, when the police asked him about it, deny all knowledge of it, I’d had enough of him. Hard to like was bad enough. Hard to like, beligerant and stupid was impossible to put up with. I set the book aside.