The Reluctant Detective, by Martha Ockley

TITLE: The Reluctant Detective
AUTHOR: Martha Ockley

COPYRIGHT: 2010
PAGES: 256
PUBLISHER: Self-published

SETTING: Contemporary England
TYPE: Mystery
SERIES: First in the Faith Morgan series

Faith was a cop, and a good one. She and her boss (and boyfriend) Detective Inspector Ben Shorter tackled criminals and solved crimes across south-east England. They were a good team. But Faith grew disillusioned with Britain's tough police culture.

As her disquiet grows, she starts to ask bigger questions - and ends up as a priest in the Church of England, a job from which she considers she can do more good than any police investigation. In the process she and Ben part company: he can't stand God-botherers, and she finds his convictions-at-any-cost attitude treads on too many vulnerable people.

Faith may have quit the world of crime, but crime has not let her go. Newly ordained, she arrives in the village of Little Worthy, near Winchester, to look around the parish. Within an hour of her arrival she witnesses the sudden shocking death of a fellow priest. To her distress, the DI assigned to the case is Ben.

At the Bishop's urging, Faith stays on to look after the improbably named parish of Little Worthy. As she meets her parishioners she learns some surprising details about her apparently well-loved predecessor, and starts to suspect a motive for his death.

The cop may have donned a clerical collar, but the questions keep coming. How will she reconcile her present calling with her past instincts? Is she in danger herself? What should she do about Ben?

The Reluctant Detective's blurb put me in mind of one of my favourite mystery series, Julia Spencer-Fleming's books following Rev. Clare Fergusson and Chief of Police Russ Van Alstyn. Like Clare with her years in the military, Faith Morgan started out her life in a profession quite far from priesthood. She was a police detective, right up until she decided she couldn't do it any longer and decided to become a Church of England vicar. So she left her boyfriend, fellow detective Ben, and went off to pursue her calling.

As the book starts, Faith has just been ordained. The priest in the parish of Little Worthing (pretty much exactly the sort of small village the name evokes) is about to retire, and Faith has travelled there to take a look around, see if it seems like the right place for her. But she arrives just in time for a shocking event: the outgoing priest dies under suspicious circumstances, right while he's celebrating mass.

Faith is asked by the bishop to stick around for a while to help take care of the understandably shocked parishioners. She's not trying to investigate the death, just doing her (new) job and counselling her parishioners, but somehow she keeps discovering all sorts of interesting details that her police training tells her the investigators need to know. And the leading investigator happens to be none other than Ben.

This was... well, it was ok. I didn't love it, I didn't hate it. These sorts of reviews are the hardest to do!

There were good things about it. It flowed well, and the mystery was well-constructed. I was interested in finding out what had happened, and I liked that Faith is genuinely not trying to play detective. She behaves perfectly sensibly and reacts in what I thought were believable ways. And though the book was probably in the 'inspirational' subgenre, any inspirational elements were relatively subtle and definitely non-preachy (at least, nothing that annoyed this atheist reader).

There were also some things I didn't like. My main problem was that several characters felt a bit off. Everyone seems quite... well, the word that comes to mind is 'uncool'. That was fine for some of the characters, but for others that vibe really didn't fit.

I also got a bit frustrated because we get lots of hints about what exactly it was that drove Faith away from Ben, but we never do find out what happened, at least not in this book. I'm assuming this is something that Ockley is leaving for later, to develop in a future book. So since I didn't like this enough to keep reading, I'll never find out. Mildly annoying (but not enough to make me read further!).

MY GRADE: A very middle-of-the-road C.