With his trademark dry humour well to the fore, the plot is fast-paced, chilling, heartwarming in places and with enough twists to satisfy whodunnit fans.
Some of his novels, although they are about the themes of the law, crime, and retribution, are not in the classic crime fiction mould in that they are not whodunnits.
They often begin by showing the criminal committing the crime, and so sidestep the whodunnit format which is the central attraction of many television crime dramas.
Conspiracies are often played out as man-in-peril (or woman-in-peril) stories, or yield quest narratives similar to those found in whodunnits and detective stories.
Exploiting a whodunnit angle, viewers were not initially told who was the father, and press interest in the fledgling show escalated as journalists attempted to guess.