DETECTIVE Joe Faraday is a decent man, a very credible gumshoe and Portsmouth is his patch. Society is a s**t heap, he muses, and it never cleans up its act.

Faraday's latest outing is a gore fest.

The first train out of Portsmouth is nipping along at 70mph. As it enters a tunnel, the driver slows to 40, peers into the gloom, waits for his eyes to adjust and when they do they fasten onto a body spreadeagled across the inside track. A body scissored open, the legs facing the oncoming train. A jolt. The driver's eyes hadn't betrayed him. That was a body. Was.

The body ("probably a male") was chained to the track. We later learn the man had to wait for over two hours for the train to arrive. There is every possibility that, given the spiralling stress, his heart gave out long before the train arrived. Hopefully.

Turns out the victim was sent on a shopping expedition to South America to purchase a swag of laughing powder.

None too bright, he blows the cash - dames, dope and drink - and, unaccountably, returns home to Britain.

What comes down the track next is not quite as gory, instead we get a wonderfully plotted yarn involving heavies who terrify sitting tenants out of their homes, bent property developers, cops being humiliated - which they hate - missing persons, visits to morgues and a scam involving season tickets for Portsmouth Football Club. Anyone looking for a Fratton Park season ticket deserves everything coming to them.

Leading up the case is the all-too human Faraday. A very credible creation. Other cynical cops see "what looks a suicide" case as "sounding very promising, indeed". Faraday knows the complexity of such a case can be allconsuming, especially when you're leading it. You need time away from it.

You need diversion of an evening. You need a reminder that there was more to life than missing persons, thugs, morgues. He needed Eadie, his one-time lover. The volatile nature of their chemistry would take care of an entire evening. Take his mind off the case.

But that volatile chemistry is what also took her away. For alone-in-life Faraday, society is a s**t heap. Fix this case, another one is coming down the line. And personally, I can't wait.