Radburn is adept at bringing this sad environment to life, and Bridges’s pain is vivid and credible. Radburn’s attempts to coalesce this well-developed character with the peripheral murder mystery placeholders are rocky, however. This is meat-and-potatoes mystery fiction, serving its diversionary purpose adequately enough, but the characters and their interactions are awfully rigid at times. The guru-like former journalist has a slight English accent, the local cop is old, apathetic, and gruff, and the interloping mainland detective is as dashing and assertive as the genre requires. This myriad of functional characters, all proceeding with a dearth of charisma, makes The Crossing’s dialogue hard to believe at times, but the plot strands do culminate in a gripping (if infeasible) ending. There are enough ideas here to suggest Radburn will sharpen these shortcomings next time around.