MICHELLE SPRING – Every Breath You Take. Laura Principal #1. Pocket, US, hardcover, 1994; paperback, 1995. Ballantine, US, paperback, 1999. First published by Orion, UK, hardcover, 1994.

   Spring is a Professor of Sociology at a British university and has published several non-fiction works. This is her first novel in a series featuring Private Investigator Laura Principal.

   Laura and her male partner-in-all-senses operate a private detective agency in London. She and her best ladyfriend co-own a cottage on the Norfolk coast, and for financial reasons decide to share the cottage with a third lady. She is an artist and Cambridge art instructor who occasionally seems to be nervous and fearful without apparent reason.

   That there were reasons becomes apparent when she is discovered brutally murdered in her flat. Laura is consumed by guilt because she didn’t pay attention to the dead woman’s fears, and begins probing her past to find answers. She finds she may not have known the woman at all.

   I didn’t dislike this, but I didn’t like it as much as I wanted to. I think my primary problem was with the prose. While the characters had the potential to be likable, the first-person narration seemed to lack immediacy and involvement, and to be almost didactic. There was a bit too much HIBK.

   A more concrete flaw was the depiction of the police, and Principal’s relations with them; it’s obvious that Spring didn’t concern herself overly with realism in this regard. The plot was eventually resolved by a device all too common, but nonetheless annoying and unsatisfying.

   After detailing all the things wrong with the book, I’m not really sure why I liked it even as much as I did while I was reading it. I guess because of the characters — but I wish she had done more with them.

      The Laura Principal series —

1. Every Breath You Take (1994)
2. Running For Shelter (1995)
3. Standing in the Shadows (1998)
4. Nights in White Satin (1999)
5. In the Midnight Hour (2001)