As The Crow Flies badly needed an editor's touch, or maybe an editor's hacksaw. Even though in a mystery/detective novel, style can be secondary to plot, ATCF reads way too much like a laundry list of things that happened. Fortunately, the plot is OK, and the prose was more pedestrian than actively annoying. Still, this could have been so much better.

(Also -- and this is a very slight spoiler -- there's way too little climbing! I picked this up in the hopes that there would be crazy climbing action, but we get hardly any of that past the first ten or so pages. It's a shame, because the little there is wasn't bad at all. I honestly can't wait for the caving-themed Dixon book.)