D.I. Callanach #1
I don’t know if I liked Perfect Remains. D.I. Callanach is a flawed character. Deeply scarred by false accusations, he lashes out when provoked and tries to keep everyone at a distance. Moving to Scotland was supposed to be a fresh start, but his past catches up to him in the middle of a brutal investigation.
I’m a big sucker for narration with accents. I can’t tell if the accents are accurate or realistic, but Angus King does Scottish, French and English accents. It was enjoyable and carried me through parts of the book I didn’t enjoy.
The villain’s POV in Perfect Remains left me feeling squeamish. Dr. Reginald King views women as objects and expects their adoration. When he doesn’t get what he wants, King reverts to a self-absorbed psycho who uses fear and torture to get what he wants. For such a brilliant and obsessive man, he’s two-dimensional and flat. I am very uncomfortable with women as objects, and Reggie King leaned into it hard. Villians are supposed to be unlikeable, and Reginald King was a success.
I didn’t enjoy D.I. Callanach as much as I would have hoped. He assumes all women find him attractive and is quite arrogant. There are many allusions to the event that caused him to leave Interpol, but the reader only knows what happened halfway through the book. The way Luc told it to Natalie didn’t make me feel empathetic towards him. It felt gross and contrived. Astrid didn’t come across as unhinged in the initial retelling.
I hate the skydiving scenes. They came out of left field and caught me off guard. The consequences of that scene were underwhelming. The whole scenario felt out of character for Luc. To clarify, it’s not that I have an issue with the skydiving scene itself. I have a problem with the lack of foreshadowing and the abrupt way the author inserted it into the story.
I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about Perfect Remains. It leans hard into plot devices I don’t enjoy but contains many things I like. The female characters were great, I enjoyed the inclusion of an ineffective and annoying police consultant, and the procedural aspects of the investigation were brilliant. I’ll read books two and three before I make a final decision about this series.
