This book really appealed to me and I was really happy to receive a copy through NetGalley. Gritty northern crime novels are right up my street, and I desperately wanted to love this. And initially I thought I was going to.

The Day of The Roaring starts strong. We have a grisly crime that doesn't make any sense and a compelling lead character in DI Diana Walker, a Black woman working in the police in the late 00s, who's moved away from Sheffield due to some events we aren't fully privy to at the start of the novel and is having to juggle her career and all the politics of race and gender that come with it at the same time as a complicated family life. Tie this together with some strong writing and a fairly authentic regional dialect on the page and I thought I was going to be in for a good time.

Unfortunately it falls off fairly quickly. The Sheffield dialect that works so well in the opening chapters starts to feel more like a bad parody of what northeners sound like (and I say this as a northerner, albeit from the other side of the Pennines). Half the time Bhadreshwar seems to forget that her characters are meant to speak in this way, and it's completely abandoned by the final act. And some of the decisions about how to render this speech are simply annoying; I never want to read "fk" in place of "fuck" ever again.

This is a shame because there are moments of brilliance on display in the writing. At times the prose slips into a really stunning cadence that reminds me of the best literary fiction, but the rest of the time it's a bit of a mess.

The biggest problem for me is that it doesn't really work as a mystery. It becomes obvious who the perpetrator is very early on, but none of the police who we're following pick up on this or connect the dots. This can work when it's done deliberately but here it was just frustrating, as I spent more than 300 pages wondering when the investigators were going to connect the very obvious dots. And when they do work out what's going on - right at the end, with barely 20 pages of the book left - it happens off screen, so that we're denied that "Aha!" moment that this genre thrives on. We jump from a fairly unrelated event to the arrest with no connective tissue to show us how DI Walker came to her conclusion and - crucially - how she convinced her colleagues to go along with it. This seems like a particular oversight, since so much of the narrative is concerned with how little they respect her and how they keep denying her instincts and holding back the investigation as a result. I really wanted her to get that moment of "I told you so" and it never happens.

Much like my frustrations with the writing - moments of brilliance hidden in a mess of clunky prose that feels like it needs a second draft - it's frustrating that the convoluted plot and poor research (the Bullring is in Birmingham, not Sheffield; MDMA has been a Class A drug since the 1970s; nobody has ever been in a mosh pit at a Def Leppard concert; the age of consent in the UK is 16, not 18) detract from the fact that Bhadreshwar is writing about some pretty serious issues that I don't think I've ever seen tackled in fiction. Her Afterword makes it clear that she's put a lot of time into researching FGM and speaking to people who have actually been impacted by it. I wish the final product of that work was better, because this feels like an important conversation to be having and fiction feels like a good place for it to start.

I've spent a lot of time criticising this. It's not terrible, but it feels half-baked - especially in the back end, which is demonstrably less polished than the opening. I suspect that were this not a review copy I would have DNFd somewhere around 60% as I felt things starting to unravel and the plot seemed to just be spinning in circles and never going anywhere. There's some bloat here, particularly involving sections from the point of view of a secondary character called Bruno that don't add anything and simply bog down the pacing. When it's good it's clear that it had the potential to be great, and that makes it incredibly disappointing that it's largely a failure to launch.