DOUBLED, CROSSED & TROUBLED
Insurance investigator Thomas Robel is convinced he’s struck gold when a woman from the US insurance company Fidelity, literally falls into his office with an offer he can’t possibly refuse: accept a £20,000 retainer to find out who’s behind a company fraud and pocket 10% of the money saved from proving any wrongdoing. Robel can hardly believe his luck. Business hasn’t exactly been great since he founded Pratt, Pratt, Wally & Pratt and a job this size could propel it towards the first rung of the corporate ladder.
Alas, there’s no such thing as an easy ride and before Robel knows it his investigation throws up more twists and turns than an Alpine pass road. Who is swindling whom, and is Mrs Fulwood, Fidelity’s Director of Claims, East Division and the bearer of the £20,000 cheque, all that she’s cracked up to be?
David Wardle is an insurance industry veteran whose used his insider’s knowledge to write a story that’s energetic, amusing in some places, and generally entertaining. Robel might not be cut from the same enigmatic cloth as his TV detective heroes Banacek and Mike Hammer, but he is street smart and does have the gift of the gab…which gets him out of one or two hairy situations.
Okay, so those are the pluses but what about the minuses? Overall, I enjoyed this book but there were times when I found the Robel character incredibly annoying. His smart Alec observations and “jokey” asides became tedious after a while and I don’t think Doctor! Oh No!, the spoof James Bond story he writes in his spare time, holds up in the book’s overall structure. The concept of a novel within a novel can sometimes work, although I don’t think Wardle gets away with it in Trouble Cross because (in my opinion) it didn’t really add anything useful to the general narrative. Having said that Trouble Cross does surprise with a genuinely good plot twist. There are some books where it’s easy to work out the ending before it happens, but even I couldn’t foresee what Wardle had up his sleeve.
Wardle is a writer with potential and it’ll be interesting to see whether his next literary offering is another reworking of the detective story/private investigator genre.
Reviewed by Juliette Foster.
Why not read David Wardle’s hugely entertaining time travel riff Rewind? Click the link to find out more about author David Wardle.
