One Man and His Bomb [Hardcover]

Detective Superintendent Harriet Martens is at home with her husband when a loud clap of thunder makes her jump. She comments that she sometimes feels a sense of foreboding at the sound. Minutes later the phone rings. There is awful news. Harriet's twin sons, both serving police officers, have been caught in a bomb blast. One is dead and the other is lying in a coma. Harriet and her husband race to the surviving son's bedside.

The very next day Harriet is called into the office by her boss. Assistant Chief Constable Brown feels the best medicine for Harriet's grief is work. A nearby research laboratory has been working on a new herbicide which is far more potent than they expected. Someone has broken in and stolen the one existing vial of this lethal stuff. The fear is that terrorists have it and will replicate it, thereby threatening the country's economy. All this is very hush, hush of course. The powers that be can't afford the media getting hold of this story. To ensure security, Harriet is to work alone to try and track down the thief and find the herbicide. She is to tell no one.

I had a number of problems with ONE MAN AND HIS BOMB. The first was the idea that a police officer, grieving over the loss of one son and the potential death of a second, would be assigned such a difficult and delicate case while still trying to coming to terms with her loss. The other is that she is working entirely alone on a matter so important.
During her investigation Harriet seems to take what she is told at face value. She makes little or no effort to follow up on information to check its veracity. I could accept that if the protagonist was an amateur sleuth but in a high ranking police officer, it seemed totally out of place.

There are also two Harriets. Harriet Martens, professional police officer and Harriet Piddock, the grieving mother. Harriet, the mother refers to the working police officer as Hologram Harriet. From time to time she pauses during her work to grieve. This seemed to be a little contrived and didn't really convey any great sense of sorrow to the reader.

ONE MAN AND HIS BOMB is the sixth Harriet Martens book and perhaps I have missed something in not reading the earlier ones. I found ONE MAN AND HIS BOMB lacklustre . To someone who has read a lot of police procedurals the sometimes very basic lapses in those procedures was very annoying and frustrating.

H.R.F. Keating is best known for his Inspector Ghote series. ONE MAN AND HIS BOMB was a very disappointing re-introduction to this author.

"One Man and his Bomb" could easily describe the author and this book. It certainly bombed for me.
The principal character, Harriet Martens, is simply unbelievable and sufficiently unlikeable to find little sympathy from this reader. It seems to me extraordinary that in these times when police procedural novels are thick on the ground, often well written and pacey, that any author can think he can get away with such wooden writing, wooden characters, lack of credibility and transparent plot devices.
Amateurish and best avoided sums it up for me.

One Man and his Bomb begins with an inexplicable act of violence. Detective Superintendent Harriet Martins is idly chatting with her husband John, having a drink with him in the local pub when she receives some devastating news. Like a pearl of thunder, her mobile phone suddenly rings with its obliterating message, her son Graham has been killed; the victim of a booby trap, and Malcolm his twin brother, who was with him at the time, has been seriously injured.

In an instant, Harriet's whole world turns upside down, and it's an existence filled to every last corner with a blank, black overwhelming grief, "nothing but utter loss." An organization of Indian terrorists take the blame, allegedly fighting against all forms of Western Imperialism, a new insidious terrorist group - perhaps modeled on al Qaeda - dedicated to ending what they see as wicked Western influences.

Harriet breaks down and she seems to split in two, both feelings battling around inside her head: The real Harriet is weighed-down with grief and the "hologram Harriet," becomes an emotionless machine, only able to think rationally about what the professional and career driven Harriet should be doing.

Told by her boss, Assistant Chief Constable Andrew Brown, that she must continue working because "work is the best the best medicine to help her get out of these troubles," Harriet carries on with her attempts to counter a possible threat of a terrorist attack in Birchester.

Brown places Harriet in charge of an investigation involving the theft of a prohibitively dangerous herbicide from Heronsgate House, an agricultural research station situated right on the outskirts of Birchester. Named CA 534, the material is indeed formidable - just a small amount of the substance unleashed into the environment has the capacity to destroy all life for miles around.

The herbicide can also be manipulated to produce an unstoppable runaway substance, several thousand times more effective than the original. But who could have taken this small sample that was once thought destroyed, and how do they propose to use it?

Arriving on the scene, Harriet interviews two feckless security guards who can tell her little, except that the intruders had scarves across their faces and rubber gloves in their hands and sported guns, and threatened to tie the two of them up and even douse them with petrol.

Heronsgate's shifty and arrogant director Dr. Lennox also offers little insight into the crime, whilst his personal assistant, the easily led and rather diffident Christopher Alexander seems to be withholding information. Suspicion also turns to Professor Wichmann, a German professor, who new Alexander and was encouraging him to take a Doctorate course in German Literature.

Aware that if something like this gets into the hands of any terrorist organization, it might prove as much a threat as whatever explosives they normally acquire, Harriet must race against time to find the perpetrators. But what appears to be random crime is in fact far more sinister. The evidence that either Professor Wichmann or his protégé were responsible for the break-in at Heronsgate House is shadowy at best.

Yet Harriet discovers that Christopher's newly acquired girlfriend Maggie, the white-smiling marathon runner, is a member of Women Against Genetic Interference, also known as WAGI, a wacko crowd who believe in stopping scientific interference by violence. The group is lead by the wealthy Gwendoline Tritton, a formidable woman who views activism as her private hobby and who thinks she knows best or believes whatever she happens to think must be so.

Most interesting is that the organization still occasionally likes to inflict a little physical damage and might well see this herbicide as a way of bargaining for their cause and even having the potential to topple the mighty British government.

The action gravitates between Harriet's professional sleuthing as she uncovers the evildoers and copes with the fact that Graham was blown to pieces on some deliberate act. She also is well ware that she must care for Malcolm now her only surviving son, who is still alive, but terribly and horribly injured.

This is a short, sharp and totally persuasive novel, which explores the complex issues of terrorism, viewing it as the new revolutionary idea where the weak have realized they possess the weapon of violence, indeed senseless violence, seen in suicide bombers all over the world. Author H.R.F. Keating writes with great deft and vigor, allowing us to get right into the heart of Harriet's troubled psyche, so that we actually share in her grief and in her search for answers.

There's no doubt that Harriet is a driven woman, especially since terrorism has struck right at the heart her family. Harriet and her sons, and her husband John, have become, however unfairly, victims of the enemy in the War on Terror. Yet Harriet ultimately has a compassionate heart and a realistic take on the problems of the world and she's the first to realize that her priorities are with her beloved Malcolm and what he needs now, more than ever, is the support and total love of his parents. Mike Leonard October 06.