“A False Dawn” by Tom Lowe – too many forensic mistakes!
This is the first published novel by this author, and it shows. Just the basics of writing would have told me this if I hadn’t read it in the blurb. It’s narrated from the POV of Sean O’Brian, a retired Miami Homicide cop and….he’s perfect! How annoying is that? Very. He finds the body of a young woman barely alive, who later dies at the hospital. Sean vows he’ll find the killer! He finds clues near her body that ALL the local cops missed! He carries little zip lock baggies to collect evidence, then shoots it the the locals for analysis. Only problem is a little thing call chain of evidence! Everything he collected would have been tossed out of court! He’s not a cop, he’s a civilian and can in no way prove where he got the stuff!
He got a lot of the forensics wrong and there’s no excuse for that. There are many good books on the subject or – call the local cops and ask questions! That’s what good writers do. He had the lab processing DNA in a few hours or days – we wish. At one point he told the cops (yeah, he did that a lot) to Luminol a building and if they find blood, type if for DNA to see if it matches one of the victims! I don’t think so – can you say contamination? He found leaves in three locations and, yes, sent them to the lab for DNA. Yes, you can get DNA form plants but…there was NO proof where he picked them up! That pesky chain of evidence thing again. One of the characters is VERY rich – but has cataracts! WHY? No one in this day and age goes blind from catarats – they are routinely removed with little trouble. He found a TRAILER where underage illegals were being kept, went inside and found it had been partition off into separate rooms! HUH? Has Lowe ever BEEN in a trailer? No room, dude. Also, one of the girls tells him they get $500 a night when going to see men in hotels!!! They are dirty, illiterate and probably diseased! Yuck, I doubt that one, too.
He makes the very common first novelist mistake of having his character names too similar. Leslie and Lauren, Dave and Dan….very confusing. Most of the novel is from Sean’s POV – except for about six-eight pages near the end! He switches to the killer’s POV to get in some information that Sean couldn’t know (but of course he figures it out with NO evidence what-so-ever). Then he’s back in Sean’s POV again. The more I got into the book, the more I found myself saying, “Oh, Pleeze!”
I could go on and on about the myriad of mistakes but there are too many books to read. Lowe can write. Let’s just hope he does a better job with his next book and is more believable. I did like his dog, Max, though.
