The Sharp End by Gabrielle Lord

Publisher's Synopsis

Detective Harry Doyle left homicide and joined the Dog Squad in the hope of improving his family life, but it hasn't turned out that way. His wife is having an affair and he can't communicate with his troubled teenage daughter. Only his dogs and eight-year-old daughter provide any warmth in his life - and even Hannah is spending more and more time in her bedroom, playing dangerous games with her computer.

Two apparently disparate murders have sufficient common threads to convince Harry that they are connected. His experience as a Vietnam veteran and his extraordinary rapport with his dogs combine to offer him clues unobserved by the average detective.

And the connection is Harry. With the killer out for revenge, his whole family is at horrible risk. And the silence which has grown between them makes them extra-vulnerable to attack.

The Sharp End is a complex and gripping thriller about murder, revenge and a man's search for peace within himself, his family and his past.

My Review 

A police procedural thriller with a difference separates The Sharp End by Gabrielle Lord from the pack of standard run of the mill crime novels. Detective Harry Doyle has a natural affinity with the dogs he works with. As a police officer with the Dog Squad, he revels in the change of pressure he works under compared with the pressure he worked under with Homicide.

It's a pity the same can't be said for his relationship with his family, his wife feeling neglected causing her to run into the arms of another man, a teenage daughter who barely utters a word to him and another playing a dangerous game on the Internet. His natural tendency is to keep his feelings and thoughts to himself which is affecting his home life more than he could ever imagine. He deals with all of these personal crises by throwing himself wholly into his job.

In quick succession he is called out to a couple of jobs, the first a siege which turns out to also be a homicide case in the Sydney suburb of Strathfield; the second a murder case which also involves a lost child in Bathurst - 200 km to the west of Sydney. Both cases require the expertise of the Dog Squad and turn out to be inexplicably related to one another and even more incredibly, related to Harry. Using the second case as a chance to escape from the upheaval of his personal problems, Harry takes one of his dogs and heads bush on the pretext of solving the Bathurst murder.

He doesn't know it but this case that started so routinely is about to blow up into one of the biggest personal crises in his life and not only will it trigger all sorts of unwanted memories but it will put Harry and his entire family at grave risk.

There is an obvious build up of tension surrounding The Sharp End as the domestic problems in the Doyle household continue to go unresolved and this is paced relentlessly by the investigation in which Harry has involved himself which becomes more extreme and more personal. It builds to a wonderful crescendo thanks to a fine balance which struck between his home and work lives highlighting how closely one affects the other.

There is a distinctive freshness about what is otherwise a fairly standard police procedural novel that is created by the addition of the Dog Squad angle and Doyle's affinity with his animals. It's an unusual specialty that you don't come across very often and the procedures and the working relationship between dog and handler makes for fascinating reading.

I was looking forward to getting right into this special bond, expecting the police dogs to play a major role in the investigation but unfortunately, after the initial introduction they tended to fade further into the background and were merely used as incidental characters. In fact, at times they proved to be a hindrance rather than a help and I thought the fact that they were so underused was disappointing.

Curiously, Lord chose to give Harry Doyle some sort of heightened sense of smell that bordered on the supernormal, supposedly thanks to his close work with his dogs. I'm not really sure how such a gift is able to rub off on a dog handler, but what it meant was that Doyle could virtually smell danger, that there was something wrong with a room when he entered and that his wife was cheating on him. There was another annoying side to this ability and that was that every time Doyle arrived at a new location of walked into a room we were given a "scent picture" of the place, the repetitive nature of which really started to grate on my nerves.

The Sharp End is a cleverly described story, an edgy thriller that revolves around the central character in ways rarely seen accompanied by an involving domestic crisis. Harry Doyle is a complicated man, taciturn by nature but an outstanding investigator. We are given a thorough insight into his life, both past and present which gives us a complete understanding of what makes him tick establishing a strong feeling of empathy towards him.

Apart from the slight disappointment over the under use of the police dog angle, I found The Sharp End to be a genuinely involving thriller. The plot is quite a complicated one, but Gabrielle Lord does well to hold it all together til its satisfying conclusion.