The Dentist (UK 2020) (US 2025) - Tim Sullivan

 Where it comes to the things I like most about crime fiction, Tim Sullivan’s The Dentist ticks most of the boxes for me. Most importantly, Sullivan writes the kind of methodical, steady paced police procedural that has become harder and harder to find in recent years because today's publishers seem to prefer publishing crime thrillers in which every other chapter ends with a shocking twist or ciffhanger designed to keep the reader turning pages as fast as possible. While those can be fun for a while, a steady diet of them can  get me to the burnout stage pretty quickly. I much prefer procedurals like The Dentist that give me time enough to think right along with the investigative team working the crime.

But it gets even better.

The Dentist is book one in what is currently an eight-book series featuring DS George Cross - and it’s the Cross character that transforms an already solid murder mystery into something truly exceptional. Cross, you see, has Asperger’s Syndrome, a subset of Autism Spectrum Disorder, a disorder with some symptoms and traits that cause him severe social interaction problems and others that make him into the almost perfect detective. 

Among the more problematic traits are: 

• an extreme difficulty making or maintaining eye contact,
• taking all conversation literally because of an inability to recognize sarcasm, implied meanings, puns, or jokes,
• a difficulty reading facial expressions and knowing when and how to enter or leave conversations, 
• being exhausted by the extra effort required to survive any kind of social interaction, and
• anxiety generated by crowds, noise, or particular smells. 

On the other hand, Asperger’s allows Cross:

• a strong memory for details related to topics he takes an interest in,
• the expertise to recognize order, pattern recognition, structure, and routines - and the ability to sense when those have been disrupted, along with
• a talent for splitting goals into precise step-by-step lists that give him great pleasure to complete.

While I found DS Cross to be a very sympathetic character, and  admired his efforts to compensate for his social shortcomings, I also appreciated the typically dry British humor that was generated by Cross’s habit of taking everything around him so literally. Never was the humor mean spirited, and it only made me like the Cross character even more. This is a fun detective series that I intend to fully explore over the next months.