A+ #BookReview: The Dentist by Tim Sullivan

The Dentist (DS George Cross Mysteries, #1) by Tim Sullivan
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, thriller
Series: DS George Cross #1
Pages: 384
Published by Atlantic Crime on October 21, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A cold case that has been ignored. . . A detective who fights for the voiceless.
THE DETECTIVE
Bristol detective DS George Cross might be difficult to work with – but his unfailing logic and determined pursuit of the truth means he is second to none at convicting killers.
THE CRIME
When the police dismiss a man's death as a squabble among the homeless community, Cross is not convinced; there are too many unanswered questions.
Who was the unknown man whose weather-beaten body was discovered on Clifton Downs? And was the same tragedy that resulted in his life on the streets also responsible for his death?
THE COLD CASE
As Cross delves into the dead man's past, he discovers that the answers lie in a case that has been cold for fifteen years.
Cross is the only person who can unpick the decades-old murder – after all, who better to decipher the life of a person who society has forgotten than a man who has always felt like an outsider himself?

My Review:

Murder mysteries usually begin with a dead body – even if the body hasn’t been found in the first chapter. That’s the usual. The victim of this particular murder is a homeless man, and it’s unfortunately also usual that the undermanned and underfunded police generally do not put much investigative effort into such cases – even though it’s obvious that this man has been murdered.

While it is entirely possible to strangle oneself – that’s what nooses are for – it’s not possible to strangle oneself with one’s OWN hands, because the one in question passes out before the job is done.

DS (Detective Sergeant) George Cross of the Avon & Somerset CID in Bristol (England), is incapable of letting a case go until he’s wrung every drop of evidence out of it – until order is restored and justice is served. His meticulousness, along with his inability to let something go until it’s completed, is how his mind works. It makes him good at his job, but equally good at pissing off his colleagues and his superiors.

But there’s just not that much to go on in this case. It looks like a case of ‘homeless against homeless’ violence, and his boss wants him to move on. Instead, he teases out the first clue, the first break in the pattern.

This unidentified homeless man had expensive, custom made contact lenses, prescribed for a not terribly common eye condition. Somewhere, there’s a record of that prescription – and an identity attached to that record.

It’s the first thread to pull in a case that’s going to unravel four deaths stretching back nearly two decades, and along with the career of one distinguished retired cop. Because the cover-up is always more damaging than the original crime.

From one perspective, The Dentist is all about the painstaking – and occasionally pain-inflicting – process of pulling together a case with very little to go on except for one detective’s absolute certainty that there is a case to be made.

From another, it’s the portrait of a neurodiverse detective who is extremely good at one thing – solving murders, while being very, very bad at even acknowledging the other humans that he needs in order to make those solutions happen.

The combination of those elements, along with the careful peeling away of the layers of the case, the layers of the past, and the layers of how a team coalesces around Cross even though he can’t quite recognize what that even means, was absolutely compelling every single page of the way.

Escape Rating A+: I yanked this out of the virtually towering TBR pile because I was having a ‘bail and flail’ moment. I wanted to read the books I’d planned to read, but I suddenly wasn’t in the mood to read them right that minute. This one has been calling my name for a while, it came out this week, and suddenly there it was on my screen and I was GONE. I emerged from the pages at THREE AM, having devoured the story in a few really absorbed hours.

Obviously, I’m recommending this loudly, highly and with bells on. The investigator, DS George Cross, is a complicated and fascinating character to follow. (He also reminds me a LOT of FBI Agent Gardner Camden in Head Cases, so if you liked that you’ll definitely like that and very much vice-versa. Also Sir Gabriel Ward in A Case of Mice and Murder, come to think of it.)

What makes George fascinating is the way that he copes with the world – and the way that the world mostly doesn’t cope with him. He is on the autism spectrum, in the part of that spectrum that was formerly referred to as Asperger Syndrome. (This book was originally published in 2020 in Britain, while the term seems to have changed in 2022 in the US)

George frustrates everyone around him, and they frustrate him. He needs the world to be orderly, and it’s not and people particularly are not. One of the more interesting aspects of the case, is that one of the persons of interest is George’s former boss, a retired DCI who made George’s life miserable at every turn and got even more vindictive and frustrated when George didn’t react as expected – because he doesn’t. But it adds a layer of complexity to every aspect of the case, not just the man’s reactions to George, but George’s lack of reactions to him, and everyone else’s expectations of a set of reactions that just aren’t part of George’s personality at all.

What makes George a successful investigator is that he has made his differences work for him BECAUSE they frustrate everyone else. Especially the people that he has built meticulous cases around that result in convictions 97 percent of the time. And that success gives him a LOT of leeway in his actions. Which he’s ALSO learned to take advantage of.

This case NEEDS someone like George. Not just because he’s painstaking in nailing down all the details, but because he doesn’t react to expectations. He doesn’t read social cues so he doesn’t do the things that people in any organization do to get along and manage their colleagues and especially their bosses. He also doesn’t get social cues at all, which means that people have to say the things that generally aren’t said in order to even try to give him orders.

Since those things aren’t said because they’re uncomfortable – at best – to say, they generally aren’t said and he just goes on doing what he intended in the first place.

The case that he’s investigating, the murder of a homeless man, is exactly the type of case that generally gets little investigation or attention, because homelessness, like all those unspoken social cues and rules that George doesn’t even see, is something that no one wants to talk about or dive into deeply.

But George is incapable of letting the disorder stand. So he digs. He digs deep and he digs far, back 15 years to an earlier murder. And then even further back than that, to a degree that no one else would even think to go.

And in that deep dive into a past that a whole lot of people have tried rather desperately to bury, he finds all the answers. So justice is ultimately served – even if it leaves several of his own superiors with a whole lot of explaining to do.

Clearly, I found this entire story riveting from the opening page. I felt a strong sense of closure at the ending – even if George himself doesn’t participate in any of the social rituals that celebrate that closure. But I’m not willing to let this character go, so I’m EXTREMELY glad that the second book in the series, The Cyclist, will be riding to my (reading) rescue in January.

Related Posts