The Teacher - Katerina Diamond

Reading Challenge Category: Free Audiobook

Official Blurb:

You think you know who to trust? You think you know the difference between good and evil? You’re wrong …
The body of the head teacher of an exclusive Devon school is found hanging from the rafters in the assembly hall.
Hours earlier he’d received a package, and only he could understand the silent message it conveyed. It meant the end.
As Exeter suffers a rising count of gruesome deaths, troubled DS Imogen Grey and DS Adrian Miles must solve the case and make their city safe again.
But as they’re drawn into a network of corruption, lies and exploitation, every step brings them closer to grim secrets hidden at the heart of their community.
And once they learn what’s motivating this killer, will they truly want to stop him?

My Thoughts:

I somehow managed to read books six and seven of this series, so I thought it might be best to go back to the beginning and get to know Imogen and Adrian properly.
I decided to give this a go as an audiobook as I had a long journey that I needed to be occupied for. Reviewing the audiobook side of things first, the narrator was pleasant to listen to, and her voice didn't grate on you, so that was a good start. Unfortunately, she tended to overemphasise some parts making the plot seem tacky and overblown. She was also not very good at doing different voices for various speakers. The author doesn't tend to write 'she said' or 'Imogen said' at the end of a block of speech. So, this made it hard to distinguish between two different people speaking. The speech parts sort of ran into each other, and you didn't know who was saying what. This wouldn't have been a problem if 'reading' the book, as the inverted commas would have denoted the end and start of different people speaking.
Now for the book itself. The main thing I can say is books six and seven have certainly improved on this one, meaning that the author has gotten better at writing. This first one in the series was a far cry from what I thought would be a great series. The storyline was all over the place, jumping from one character to the next. It might not have been so bad if the chapters had been small and quick, but they were over 30 minutes long, meaning you were ensconced in this person’s life for quite some time and not really knowing what each chapter had to do with the next. Considering this is advertised as the DS Imogen Grey series, she played a tiny part. We only got to see things from her perspective about three times throughout the entire book. We saw more from DS Adrian Miles than we did Imogen. Their policing skills certainly get better in time as well. Their actions are very amateurish in this story, and we don’t really get to play a big part in them solving the crime. If you can even say they do that, as most things that bring it all together in the end sort of land on their lap. It doesn’t come down to clever detective work, that’s for sure.
I really liked the Abby sections; however, for how insignificant she ends up being, the book predominately concentrates on her. I couldn’t really see the relevance, and it was annoying when her part was done, and she sort of disappeared from the book.
The ending was just bad. Everything the killer and the people being killed had portrayed up to the end had been done very cleverly. All of a sudden, all of this deviousness was thrown out of the window, and stupid actions took over. I don’t know why Tom had to be taken; this made no sense other than to send Adrian into a flap. If he had been missing throughout the entire book, it might have been a little better. However, it just didn’t fit into the story as a whole. There was no reason for his abduction; it bore no relevance to the man Adrian was chasing. It wasn’t going to allow this person to escape; if anything, it stopped him from doing so.
So, overall I was very disappointed in this book. Books six and seven are superb, and I had hoped that the whole series would be too. I am unsure whether to fill in the gaps and read the intermediary books or leave it there, now knowing Imogen’s start and knowing the books are much better later on?
Maybe this would have been better if I had read it and not listened to it, I do think this may have hindered my enjoyment, but I still think it would have only gotten three stars. Unfortunately, this only gets two stars with the combination of the problems on the audiobook side of things.