"Best Served Cold" by David Gatward

DCI Harry Grimm is slowly realizing that his “secondment” or loan from the Bristol police to those in a small town in the Yorkshire Dales is looking less and less temporary. He’s moving into a flat from his hotel. He’s having to learn his way among the back roads of the largely farming community he’s found himself in. Even if his new boss would like to side the back of him, it’s looking more and more like he’s staying. 

What his new boss really doesn’t like is Grimm’s magnet-like attraction for murder. If Grimm’s around, murder’s not far behind. 

 

In Best Served Cold by British writer David Gatward, it isn’t a single murder than finds Grimm. It’s what looks like a series of them. A farmer nobody like is found in a field brutally murdered with his tractor. At first it looks accidental, but the scene seems too strange for the death to be an accident. Plus, the victim has an eagle feather in his mouth. Then a body is found floating in a cow manure pit, with the victim again having an eagle feather in his mouth. By the time a third victim is murdered, almost in front of Grimm and the local doctor, the race is on before the murdered strikes again. And they know he will strike again.

 

David Gatward

In addition to the DCI Harry Grimm series, Gatward has published children’s and teen fiction, taught creative writing sessions, worked as an editor, started a small publishing firm, and returned to writing when the COVID pandemic arrived. He grew up in the Cotswolds and Yorkshire in England (including the town for the setting of Grimm Up North), and he’s also lived in Lincolnshire and the Lake District.

 

Best Served Cold, the second in the series, carries the trademark grisly story and dark humor of its predecessor. Grimm is one of the more unusual police detectives, carrying with him a desire for revenge against his own father, brother in prison, scarring from an explosive device in the Iraqi War, and a determination not to suffer fools gladly, including his own boss.

 

Related:

 

Grimm Up North by David Gatward.

Some Thursday Readings

 

Murders for February – Jeremy Black at The Critic Magazine.

 

Poet Laura: Journeys – Michelle Rinaldi Ortega at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

First passages of rolled-up Herculaneum scroll revealed – Jo Marchant at Nature.