Tom is a plumber who's got a knack for finding things: Secrets, bodies, water. He helps the police find the body of a young woman, the girlfriend of an old schoolmate.
Another old schoolmate shows up, Phil, Tom's erstwhile crush as well as his bully. He's a PI and hired to help find the girls murderer. He's asking for Tom's help, but is also showing a rather unprofessional interest in Tom, when the two of them are not butting heads.
So, this is more of a crime novel with romance elements than the other way around, but that's fine, since I do enjoy a good english murder mystery.
I did like Tom, he's chipper and a bit cheeky and I just thought the concept of a plumber-psychic was pretty unusual, but cool.
Now, Phil is another matter, he's a terrible grump at the best of times, close-mouthed and unreadable.
For the first third of the book I simply hated the two together. Tom hat some legitimate beef against Phil and Phil always got awfully defensive about it, so I couldn't quite begrudge him a few jibes, but it got pretty out of hand, I thought. Tom just had to hint at Phil being in the closet pretty much in every conversation and it didn't help my opinion of him. I kept thinking it made him seem really hung up about it and very salty. And Phil seemed to be touchy about nearly everything Tom said. Their conversations where really a pain to read sometimes.
It got better after a while, though, then they managed to spend some time without ripping into each other, and I did manage to thaw to Phil a bit. It helps, when he actually does reveal something about himself, though I still can't quite place him, and I'm interested how the relationship will play out in the later books. The book doesn't give us a lot of the with them together, after all, and it is a pretty complicated matter, feeling-wise, they have going on.
Luckily the plot focused mostly on the investigation, so even when I didn't like their interaction, it still kept me reading, since I wanted to find out who did it. It's not the most complex murder mystery with big twists, but it's an interesting character study of a variety of suspects that I found engaging. The characterization and depth of the characters is not as good as in a pure crime novel, but it was enjoyable enough, even though some parts where a bit foreseeable.