John Connor has built a bit of a reputation in crime-writing circles for his series of thrillers centring on deeply-troubled Detective Constable Karen Sharpe.

The basis for this reputation seems to be the detail he puts in about police procedures.

The man himself (John Connor is a pen name) spent 15 years leading a team of lawyers on drugs and homicide cases in Bradford and Leeds.

He left that job to concentrate on his writing, to make crime pay. He now lives in Belgium with his wife, a translator, returning to Yorkshire occasionally to check locations for his Karen Sharpe books.

It's a pity he didn't spend a bit longer on his research for his fourth book, Falling, in which he has an Asian family located in Alwoodley in north-west Leeds and two detectives (one of them a Sikh) sharing a large house in Heaton, Bradford.

In an online interview last year attention was drawn to Connor's real-life locations; but he is by no means unique in this respect.

Keighley crime writer Lesley Horton based her first four Detective Inspector Handford thrillers in Bradford. The fifth, Twisted Tracks, ventures further afield in West Yorkshire. Both of Younis Alam's crime books are located in Bradford.

Other writers have been using real-life locations for years: think of Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse in Oxford, Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus in Edinburgh and Priscilla Masters; Detective Inspector Joanna Piercy in Staffordshire.

In the aforementioned interview, John Connor referred in passing to Bradford's appeal as a location: "It seemed as richly destructive as any city of greater note or size," he said.

In his latest Karen Sharpe murder story, in which the pregnant Asian wife of a lawyer is brutally stabbed to death, destructiveness also takes the form of a West Yorkshire race riot instigated by National Front or BNP skinheads.

The story in Falling is spoiled by too much descriptive scene-setting and portrait painting. Readers can gather all they need to know about a character from how he or she talks.

Chunky paragraphs devoted to facial details may seem forensic but they interrupt the flow. Elmore Leonard, for example, is especially good at eliminating superfluous details. One of his ten rules of writing is that anything that looks like good' writing (purple prose) is deleted.

I found the first 80 pages a struggle. My attention was distracted by faults in the writing - mixed metaphors, hackneyed figures of speech, repetition, and sometimes by plot inconsistencies.

At the beginning of chapter five, for instance, we learn that after eight days the police investigation has yielded nothing.

But in chapter 12 house-to-house inquiries have been going on for only five days.

Tormented Karen Sharpe, based on a real undercover operative Connor knew while working for the Crown Prosecution Service in London, flits in and out of the opening 14 chapters along with a big cast of characters - I stopped counting at 20 after 49 pages.

Trying to keep the reader guessing is an integral part of crime writing; but so is keeping his attention. Falling, I'm afraid, fell a long way short of keeping mine.

  • Falling, by John Connor, is published by Orion at £9.99.