Fatal Flaw

I'm fond of British police procedurals, and Frank Smith's *Fatal Flaw* is a solid contribution to the genre. It held my attention from the first page to the last. Smith lays out some good plot lines and brings us quite a few solid characters. A woman with a secret past starts dating a cop, and that secret becomes central to a murder the detective is investigating. A troubled teenager with a cold ambitious mother is found dead at her boarding school during the holidays - was she driven to suicide, or murdered, or did she die some other way? I would recommend this book to anybody else who enjoys this genre.

I am a huge fan of British police procedurals and I was delighted to see a new team had been born. On the whole, Frank Smith's Fatal Flaw does not disappoint, but his second book in this series, Stone Dead is a much better read. Fatal Flaw's story is good and it runs smoothly and quickly. His two coppers, DCI Paget and DS Tregalles are likeable fellows, but I find that the Sergeant has a lot more personality than the somewhat stiff and blah Chief Inspector (Smith spends a little too much time torturing us with Paget's terrible luck in love). But, in the first book and the third (Candles for the Dead), Tregalles almost seems a minor character. All in all, the series is good and I can't wait for the fourth installment.