Cosa Nostra by John Dickie, reviewed by Mari Biella

The word ‘mafia’ is known to everyone; and yet not many people have a very clear idea of what it is. Mention the mafia, and most people probably think of the American Mafia (though this is in fact an offshoot of a decidedly Sicilian tree), or a scene from The Godfather. The truth, as John Dickie shows in this excellent account, is both more interesting, and more complicated and harrowing, than fiction.

Nobody knows quite when or how the mafia came into being; even the origin of the name is now hopelessly lost and obscure. Mafiosi themselves tend to use the name ‘Cosa Nostra’ – ‘our thing’. The organisation owes much, perhaps, to Sicily’s unique history. This small island, situated in the middle of the Mediterranean, barely a stone’s throw from the Italian mainland and yet very different to the remainder of the peninsula, has been conquered by Greeks, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, and the French. Some of these colonial powers were more forbearing than others, but ordinary Sicilians rarely benefited from their rule. Distrust of the state, and the conviction that an honourable man sorts out his own problems and avenges insults and injuries on his own initiative, was and is widespread. Strange as it may sound, honour – albeit of the kind that few outsiders would recognise – is written into the mafia’s DNA.

The mafia seems always to have existed on two levels. On one level, it is hidden and mysterious, a sub-stratum that only its members know of or understand. Crime – fraud, drug-trafficking, money-laundering, protection rackets – is its raison d’être. On another level, however, it rises up into the mainstream and infiltrates politics, law enforcement, the judiciary, the Church. As the author says, Cosa Nostra ‘is a shadow state, a political body that sometimes opposes, sometimes subverts, and sometimes dwells within the body of the legal government.’ (Of course, and as it’s only fair to point out, there have also been politicians, policemen, judges and priests who have courageously taken a stand against the mafia, and have paid dearly for it.)

There have been many attempts to deal with the mafia, none of which have been entirely successful. Mussolini launched a war against Cosa Nostra, perhaps motivated by an incident that occurred when he visited Palermo and the mayor (a Mafioso) gestured at his bodyguards and said, ‘You are with me, you are under my protection. What do you need all these cops for?’ The implication was clear: here, the mafia were in control. The duce did not take kindly to such a statement, and under his regime the mafia seemed to be in retreat – only to advance again in the post-war era. In the 1980s, in the aftermath of the brutal Mafia Wars, a determined effort to overcome the mafia was launched by magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and led in time to the Maxi Trial, in which 342 mafiosi were convicted. The mafia response was swift and brutal: Falcone, Borsellino and many others were killed, which in turn led to a wave of public revulsion.

Which leads us neatly to the present situation, insofar as it can be understood. The Pax mafiosa, ironic as the name may sound, is in place, and the days of car bombs and public shootings seem to be over, at least for now. Brutality continues (‘I filled a cemetery all by myself,’ new capo Matteo Messina Denaro has reportedly claimed), but it does so in private and out of sight. The modern mafia have grasped one of the more elemental, and odd, rules of postmodern society: that which does not exist in the media can be said, in a certain sense, not to exist at all.

What of the future? This versatile organisation, deeply embedded in the structure of Sicilian society, probably isn’t going anywhere fast. It may change and adapt, but it will almost certainly continue – for the time being. ‘The mafia of Sicily pursues money and power by cultivating the art of killing people and getting away with it,’ Dickie states. That, at least – sadly – is unlikely to change any time soon.

Red Champagne by Reb MacRath

Review by Bill Kirton

Where to begin with the various pleasures of this short narrative? The atmospheric evocation of a period (the 1930s) with its music, its lifestyles and the glamour of travelling on a powerful beast of a luxury train? Well, yes, that’s a start. Then there are the passengers, a group of interesting, interacting characters, each with his or her striking characteristics and agendas and each an important element in the mystery which is the defining centre of the narrative. Or maybe we should focus on the magical aspect of a story which gives its protagonists chances to relive and actually alter the experiences that lead up to and beyond that mystery, learning more about themselves as they do so, and subtly changing their approaches to the dilemmas they face.

The truth is that all these (and other) effects are woven together with such skill and élan that we just sit back and enjoy the spectacle as we hurtle with the characters through the night of Xmas Eve 1938. the author sustains the narrative’s pace with deceptive ease, teases us with repeated snippets of events which fold us into the time shifts without disorientation, and even, despite the seeming impossibilities of achieving a satisfactory resolution, comes up with a happy ending.

On top of all this, there’s also the obvious delight he takes in using language and making his words work hard for the effects he seeks. There are the “boarded windows of bored–dead enterprises” which are both “a misty presence to the eye” and “musty presents to the fog, as happily haunted as holes in the hills." It’s a deliberate manipulation of language which both contributes to the text’s impact and offers the additional pleasure of purely linguistic effects and allusions. After a throwaway mention of Byron, for example, a conversation contains the exchange and comment:

"You're mad."

"And bad and dangerous."

To know what she'd done and to see her like this […] was more than Claire could suffer.

The positioning of that “To know” brings a smile that has little to do with the story and lots to do with just the joy and power of words.

I note that the book’s garnered plenty of 5 star reviews. That’s no surprise at all – it’s from the pen/keyboard of a real writer.

Red Champagne by Reb MacRath

“Bing crooned on the speakers. The orchestra swooned. Moonlight shone through half-drawn blinds, lushly pooled with the shadowless light and the smoke. Well-heeled couples laughed and kissed, half-aglow like Christmas bulbs. Life didn’t get any better than this, even on this dreadful night.”

Beautiful and evocative without ever wandering or losing pace, Red Champagne thunders forward with the same relentless rhythm as the train aboard which much of the story takes place. And yet this story, for all its narrative drive, is not strictly sequential, or bound by the usual structure of temporal necessity. In fact, the idea of temporal dislocation is key to much of the action. Here, time is malleable; the past can be revisited and altered (a prospect that anyone who’s ever had any regrets about anything will find attractive).

The story follows “Gentleman Jimmy”, or Jimmy Fields, the red-haired Irish American ex-safecracker who has begun to create a new life for himself on the right side of the law. Fields is looking forward to a seemingly bright future as he travels cross-country on one of the most luxurious trains of his time, the Twentieth Century. He is with his fiancée Claire, and has plenty of money in the bank. However, there are – of course – one or two clouds on the horizon.

One shadow is thrown by Claire herself, who is frustrated by her lack of progress in her preferred career – so frustrated, in fact, that her way of dealing with her disappointment is almost schizophrenic, and yet fits nicely with the common desire to overcome our own limitations and shrug off our old identities. Watching, and trying to reconcile the different sides of his fiancée’s mercurial personality, Fields occasionally wonders whether their forthcoming marriage is really the panacea he hoped.

A far more serious problem, however, is posed by the presence of the ominous Inspector Reed, a corrupt cop who “will be paid not with money but pain.” Reed won’t rest until Gentleman Jimmy is in prison. And he’s here, aboard the Twentieth Century, following Fields like a threatening shadow.

Then, as the Twentieth Century charges through the snowbound countryside on Christmas Eve, disaster strikes. The conductor and a young boy have become trapped in the onboard safe. “The facts are as grim as they’re simple”: the conductor is the only person who knows the combination to open the door. The train is many miles from any kind of possible outside assistance, and the air supply inside the safe is limited. Fields is faced with an agonising dilemma: he could crack the safe using his old skills, thus effectively exposing himself to Reed as Gentleman Jimmy; or he could turn away from the tragedy unfolding on the train, effectively paying for his own happiness with the lives of others.

Red Champagne captured beautifully for me how much of a person’s life can hang on an instant, and on Fate’s seemingly random flips of the coin. It’s about regret, certainly, and about the desire to overcome the dual tyranny of both the self and the past. Ultimately, though, it is also about hope and happy endings. It’s appropriate, I suppose, that this novel should have been published just before Christmas, the season of supposed miracles. This is a story about a miracle, of sorts; but it’s also about two vivid and sympathetic characters, whose future happiness you’ll desire almost as much as they themselves do.

Red Champagne can be downloaded from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

Did She Kill Him? by Kate Colquhuon reviewed by Julia Jones

I love the subtitle to this book: Did She Kill Him? A Victorian Tale of Deception, Adultery & Arsenic. Did She Kill Him? is an account of the 1889 trial of Florence Maybrick who was accused of poisoning her older husband, Liverpool cotton merchant James Maybrick, with arsenic. Colquhuon's diligent research and effective presentation makes arsenic a major player in this story -- almost a household member or the third person in an unhappy marriage.

"Toxic to most plants and to all animals with a central nervous system arsenic was practically impossible to evade by the mid-nineteenth century, present in clothes and candles, wallpapers and lampshades, in confectionery and millinery, fake flowers, concert tickets, toys beer, cot and boot linings, perambulators and pants as well as being legitimately available for killing rats, moths and flies [...] so pervasive was it that in 1860 the Lancet invited its readers to imagine a man living in  cloud of arsenical dust, sitting in his library on a summer day, his walls coated with arsenic, a suspicious green dust on his books and arsenical particles floating in the air, filling his air passages, inflaming his eyes, disturbing his digestion and preparing him for dismal and racking pains."*

Arsenic was a source of sensational stories which were all too often true. True crime aficionados and anyone intrigued by forensics will enjoy Colquhuon's explanations of the different scientific tests being developed for arsenical poisoning and the revelations of inadequacy in the doctors and the expert witnesses testifying at Florence Maybrick's trial.  Florence's husband James was a self-medicator and an arsenic addict. When the family GP responded to Florence Maybrick's anxiety and queried the number of pills and potions littering her husband's dressing room, James Maybrick simply changed doctors.

Arsenic made him dyspeptic, irritable and hard to live with. Worse than that; one reason for Maybrick's arsenic habit (and probably for his sensitivity on the subject) was that it was a drug believed to enhance potency. Maybrick was never a faithful husband. There were actual third -- and fourth -- persons in this marriage. James 'kept' a mistress permanently: Florence 'played away' once. It's a shocking indictment of late Victorian double standards that, in Judge Stephens's summing up at the end of the complex murder trial, Florence's few nights with a young lover in a London hotel became almost the justification for her conviction. Nothing was made of James's long-term affair and even Florence herself appears to have colluded with her lawyers in suppressing the identity of the Other Woman.

Colquhuon writes well about the mutual disenchantments and "curdling discontent" within this marriage. Part one of Did She Kill Him? is written with the vividness of a bio-pic. She does not hesitate to describe the smell of the sea or the drumming of the rain, the smouldering of ash in the household grate or Florence's movements as she examines her own complexion in the mirror. "Although I have stuck rigorously to contemporary sources, the reconstruction of history inevitably remains to some extent a work of imagination." As a reader I hesitated a moment then relaxed and enjoyed the sensuousness of this descriptive writing.

It vanishes, rightly, from the analysis of the trial. Here Colquhuon is clear and painstaking. The doctors are on trial as much as the accused. The court of public opinion is fully involved and jurors are confused and fallible.  The scene is set for a miscarriage of justice which Colquhuon suggests has much wider ramifications than the fate of a single individual. She works hard to situate Florence Maybrick in her social and cultural context -- an American girl caught in the stifling atmosphere of the affluent provincial middle class, an exemplar of changing attitudes towards female sexuality, a young wife in a household where she has no meaningful occupation. James and Florence, their children and domestic staff, lived at "one of Liverpool's best suburban addresses". It's an added pleasure that the name of their substantial, squarely built semi was Battlecrease House.


*italics are used in this book to refer the reader to sources in the endnotes. My copy was a printed proof. I imagine they could be especially effective in indicating links in the electronic version. I notice an Amazon reviewer grumbling about the quantity of endmatter. Personally I felt that this was a full account and I would expect it to be well-referenced -- which it is.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Did-She-Kill-Him-Victorian-ebook/dp/B00DVL655Y/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1395079884&sr=8-1-fkmr0

The Sleeping Warrior by Sara Bain.

review by Bill Kirton

This really is an intelligent, clever book. And that’s precisely the sort of sentence that could put off potential readers so let me qualify it. I don’t mean that it uses long, posh words or that its characters sit around sipping absinthe and talking about Plato. No, the intelligence is that of the author, who’s deliberately set out to follow a piece of advice one often hears – write what you’d like to read. In one of her author interviews, she revealed that she’s always read fantasy and so wanted her first book to be ‘within the confines of [that] genre and all its associated subgenres’. In fact, her preferred version was epic fantasy.

It’s therefore something of a surprise when you start reading to find that, right from the tense, gripping, mysterious opening, you’re faced with a cast of characters and a sequence of events that seem instead to fit perfectly into the crime genre. Solicitor Libby Butler is called to a police station to represent a mysterious figure, Gabriel Radley. He’s wearing studded leather armour and his first words to her are ‘There is nothing in the darkness that cannot be seen in the light’. So yes, there are early indications that this character operates in a different dimension, but he’s also very much part of a familiar everyday reality. The settings are ‘normal’, the various characters, male and female, are very ‘real’, their conversations are sharp, witty, often very funny, and the author moves it all along at a dramatic, exciting pace. Interest never flags and we’re faced with an intriguing but entirely authentic situation and sequence of events.

But, at significant points in the narrative, that familiarity with what’s happening is disturbed by the actions of  Gabriel. His central mystery revolves around a quest for a lost ‘stone’ and, gradually, every other narrative thread – the search for a serial killer, a cult group, gangsters, assassins and the police – are drawn into that same quest. It’s such a good ‘crime novel’ that these mysterious, supernatural ingredients increase the reader’s nervousness, add intrigue to his/her uncertainties. It’s fascinating to be confronted with not only the mysteries in the book but also our own reactions to them. We’re following a crime investigation, looking for clues, the characters are herded into difficult situations from which there seems no escape and, suddenly, there’s a shift in the continuum and different values must be applied as Gabriel’s powers adjust the interplay between darkness and light.

All in all, the novel is proof that, rather than diluting the effect of genre fiction, a sensitive, intelligent mixing of themes and characteristics can reinforce the different genres’ impact. Sara Bain has been bold in defying the received wisdom of staying within prescribed boundaries and as a result has produced a highly readable, very enjoyable and distinctly original work.

Manhattan '62 by Reggie Nadelson reviewed by Julia Jones

Reggie Nadelson is a woman of many talents. She's a travel writer,  a documentary film-maker, a journalist, a foodie and is impressively knowledgeable about the cultural politics of jazz and early rock music. She is also the author of the Artie Cohen series of crime novels. There have been nine titles to date, each book evoking the ethnographies, the atmospheres, the mores of specific areas of New York city -- small unique enclaves within Brooklyn, Harlem, Manhattan, each of them as distinctive and individual as villages. Her 2011 Artie Cohen novel, Bloodcount, centred on a single building, the Louis Armstrong Apartments in Harlem during the emotional aftermath of Barack Obama's December 2008 election. It was memorable for its sense of place, of personal histories and its evocation of an unrepeatable moment in time.

Nadelson's new novel, Manhattan '62, takes the action back to the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. On October 16th 1962, when President Kennedy was first shown the evidence of Russian missile sites, New York detective Pat Wynne is taken to view a body on one of the piers by the Hudson River. Wynne knows that this is an area that the Mafia use for executions. A Mob killing, maybe that's all it is -- or perhaps the victim was one of those 'homos' that the Mayor of New York is trying to eradicate before the World Trade Fair comes to the city. This is 1962 when gay sex was illegal in both the UK and USA. Senator McCarthy was dead by 1962 but his legacy of smear and suspicion lived on, poisoning both private and public lives. To be suspected of homosexuality was at least as damaging as to be accused of communist sympathies
.
There's paranoia in the city. Tommy, the twelve-year-old who has found the body, is convinced that there are spies coming in via the Hudson River: "Reds. Fucking Commies. Russkis. Cubans. Gonna kill us all." Detective Wynne would be glad to believe that the body on the pier was a 'normal' Mafia payback but he can't. The dead man has a tattoo that Wynne has seen before -- a worm entwined around the slogan 'Cuba Libre'.   He's seen it on another mutilated corpse, a young girl found hanging from the High Line. Wynne was investigating her case but got little support from his fellow-officers and has made no progress in discovering either the victim's identity or her killer.

This time it's worse as he's convinced that he knows the most likely suspect for the murder -- his new Russian friend, Maxim Ostalsky. Wynne first met Ostalsky in Greenwich Village, just a few months earlier when he watched the Russian trying, ineptly, to buy a hot dog. The American is a veteran of the Korean War, he's damaged and suspicious yet, from that moment, Ostalsky has him charmed. They have become friends -- drunk together, smoked and talked and loved the same woman. It is this portrayal of an unlikely friendship that raises Manhattan '62 above the level of a normally good historical detective story. The bewildering political complexity of the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis is mediated through Wynne's confusion as he is warned off the murder case and finds his closest colleagues and even his family unwilling to take his calls. He becomes a pariah, struggling with his suspicions of Ostalsky, with his sexual jealousy but still vulnerable to the Russian's apparent openness and charm. Inevitably there is betrayal on both sides -- and all this in a city on the verge of nuclear holocaust.

Nadelson's writing is a delight - tangy, idiomatic, instantly involving - and for readers of her excellent 2009 Artie Cohen novel Londongrad there is a final, satisfying connection, which I should have guessed but didn't.

The Sleeping Warrior by Sara Bain.

review by Bill Kirton

This really is an intelligent, clever book. And that’s precisely the sort of sentence that could put off potential readers so let me qualify it. I don’t mean that it uses long, posh words or that its characters sit around sipping absinthe and talking about Plato. No, the intelligence is that of the author, who’s deliberately set out to follow a piece of advice one often hears – write what you’d like to read. In one of her author interviews, she revealed that she’s always read fantasy and so wanted her first book to be ‘within the confines of [that] genre and all its associated subgenres’. In fact, her preferred version was epic fantasy.

It’s therefore something of a surprise when you start reading to find that, right from the tense, gripping, mysterious opening, you’re faced with a cast of characters and a sequence of events that seem instead to fit perfectly into the crime genre. Solicitor Libby Butler is called to a police station to represent a mysterious figure, Gabriel Radley. He’s wearing studded leather armour and his first words to her are ‘There is nothing in the darkness that cannot be seen in the light’. So yes, there are early indications that this character operates in a different dimension, but he’s also very much part of a familiar everyday reality. The settings are ‘normal’, the various characters, male and female, are very ‘real’, their conversations are sharp, witty, often very funny, and the author moves it all along at a dramatic, exciting pace. Interest never flags and we’re faced with an intriguing but entirely authentic situation and sequence of events.

But, at significant points in the narrative, that familiarity with what’s happening is disturbed by the actions of  Gabriel. His central mystery revolves around a quest for a lost ‘stone’ and, gradually, every other narrative thread – the search for a serial killer, a cult group, gangsters, assassins and the police – are drawn into that same quest. It’s such a good ‘crime novel’ that these mysterious, supernatural ingredients increase the reader’s nervousness, add intrigue to his/her uncertainties. It’s fascinating to be confronted with not only the mysteries in the book but also our own reactions to them. We’re following a crime investigation, looking for clues, the characters are herded into difficult situations from which there seems no escape and, suddenly, there’s a shift in the continuum and different values must be applied as Gabriel’s powers adjust the interplay between darkness and light.

All in all, the novel is proof that, rather than diluting the effect of genre fiction, a sensitive, intelligent mixing of themes and characteristics can reinforce the different genres’ impact. Sara Bain has been bold in defying the received wisdom of staying within prescribed boundaries and as a result has produced a highly readable, very enjoyable and distinctly original work.

One of Us by Iain Rowan - reviewed by Debbie Bennett

I've read quite a few books about crime rings, drug runners, mafia-style gangs etc - from the point of view of the hard men (and women) involved. You know the type: big bad boss will kill on sight but always has a Sunday roast with his gran and has a soft spot for kittens. I've read books that concentrate on the victims: the sex-trafficked, the tarts-with-a-heart clichéd characters that all start to look the same after a while.

This novel is different. Illegal immigrant Anna is neither victim nor perpetrator of crime - and yet she may be actually be both. From a life of relative luxury in Russia, Anna fled to England when her family was murdered. With no papers and no legal status, she works in a burger bar and tries to make ends meet while she saves up the money to buy her legitimacy. In passing conversation with a customer, she mentions she was a medical student, almost a qualified doctor back in Russia, and that throwaway comment may cost her more than she realises when she finds out the customer is employed by crime-boss Corgan, who just happens to be looking for a doctor to treat gunshot wounds, sexual-abuse victims - anybody who gets injured in the line of Corgan's duty. Promised the prize of identity papers, Anna get sucked into Corgan's world and finds that getting out again alive is not so easy.

Rowan's skill in this novel is not so much plot - though it has enough satisfying twists and turns to satisfy any crime fan. For me, what engaged me as a reader was his skill in characterisation. The whole story is told from Anna's point of view and never once does Rowan slip up with Anna's voice. She speaks perfect English - she's educated, obviously - but it's the turn of phrase, the way sentences are constructed, the lack of colloquialisms and contractions that give the authenticity to Anna's character. And even the minor characters have a depth and quality that is rare in this type of novel. As Anna can't decide whether to put her trust in the dependable brotherly Sean or the flash and sexually-attractive Daniel, Rowan manages to create a complex duality in both men and we are as undecided as Anna.

This is life seen from an illegal immigrant's point of view - always under the radar, a non-person not entitled to what we would consider basic essentials and always scared of being found out and deported. And yet Anna has an empathy with the patients she treats. Doing nothing is never an option and she starts to fight back against Corgan, the corruption and the entire system which has forced her to live this way.

An excellent novel. I enjoyed reading this and will look out for more books by this author. 

One of Us, reviewed by Debbie Bennett

Punchline by Paul Fenton

by Bill Kirton

It seems I’m forever making disclaimers about books written by friends but it’s important to establish that I NEVER let that sort of subjectivity influence what I write. No, the only subjectivity involved is ‘Did I enjoy the book and, if I did, why?’ If I don’t like a book, I don’t read beyond the first few pages. Life’s too short. So my comments here are just a record of my reactions as I read this book and my critical reflections after I’d finished it.

First then, the general points. It’s a crime/mystery novel but, as well as ticking the boxes the genre requires, the author also manages to parody it and sometimes offer a wry commentary on its conventions. It’s intriguing, funny, clever and has that essential page-turning impetus.

I hesitate to say much about the circumstances in which the protagonist finds himself and how he reacts to them because, with such a layered construction, the slightest lapse on my part could be seen as a spoiler. The first person narrator is a writer who discovers that his books are on the shelves of bookshops but each credited to a different author and none of them to him. His feelings when he finds the first of these plagiarised novels are sensitively observed and beautifully described – except that words such as ‘sensitive’ and ‘beautiful’ don’t convey the baseness of some of his responses. This is the sort of spare writing advocated by Elmore Leonard.

Sometimes, though, when the pace is hurtling along and we want to know how a particular situation will be resolved, the narrator’s reflections, associations and digressions tend to slow progress. They’re always very entertaining but Fenton has piqued our curiosity and that needs to be satisfied, so we’re eager for the old ‘what happened next?’. On the other hand, one of the many revelations which form the book’s dénouement suggests that this digressive tendency might perhaps be indicative of … no, that might be a spoiler.

The plotting is careful and the characters’ actions, while sometimes extreme, are always plausible and  played out in very real settings, conveyed by witty observations of telling details, and the wise-cracking narrator sees the humour in every situation. In fact, Fenton places him in several scenarios which might be seen as typical set-pieces in the crime genre. The difference here is that, while definitely a master of the one-liner, he’s not your run of the mill, hard-nosed Private Eye, but a ‘normal’ person walking the ‘ordinary’ streets of Clapham.

I’m forcing myself to resist quoting some of the situations he finds himself in and how he reacts to them. They’re very funny, but conveyed in terms which show that Fenton’s choice of title was deliberate. He sets up some gags, yes, but he invariably takes them an extra step or adds a twist which intensifies them. And they’re all very carefully written. Look, for example, at the writer’s dismissive attitude to wannabes:

“Yeah, right. Everyone has a novel in them. Almost everyone is capable of sexual intercourse too, more or less, but no one likes to watch ugly people fuck.”

And, while it’s funny that he’s nearly knocked out by a dominatrix brandishing a latex dildo, it’s even better when she says “And do you want to know where it was just a few minutes ago?”

If you don’t like rude words or a high body count, skip over some bits, but if you like to be drawn into a book, intrigued by questions of who and why, entertained and made to laugh, this is for you. It’s great writing.

The Car Bomb by T.V. LoCicero

Review by Bill Kirton

No writer would want to be compared with the late and very much lamented Elmore Leonard; it would be the kiss of death because he’s incomparable. Having said that, there are many aspects of The Car Bomb which recall the great man’s style and preoccupations.

First of all, it’s set in Detroit – a Detroit not yet as low as it is today but well on the way down. LoCicero notes that ‘the corruption is rampant in this town’ and calls it a ‘hapless city’.

Next, the citizens he shows us have the same confusing moral compass that sets good guys and bad guys on the same level, each with characteristics which belong to the other end of the spectrum to that which they seem to occupy.

The central character, local TV anchor Frank DeFauw, a handsome, charismatic, family man with a regular mistress and a taste for other casual, extra-marital encounters, is said by his son Bobby, many of his friends and colleagues (and by Frank himself), to be ‘full of bullshit’. At one point, even as he’s thinking about his other son, Tommy, who was killed in a boating accident, he ‘glimpsed an attractive redhead pulling a ballpoint pen and a pad of yellow sticky notes from her purse’. And this is one of the (very few) ‘good’ guys. Another character’s opinion of him was that ‘he was not just smart, but clever and intuitive about people, dedicated, caring and, probably more than any white guy she had ever known, color blind’.

Opposite him, his school friend, Judge William O’Bryan, whose job it is to uphold the sanctity of the law and hand out judgements in court, is as corrupt as they come and totally lacking in compassion. When Frank asks him why a person he (Frank) thinks is innocent would kill his wife and kids, the reply is chilling. ‘Why do evil or fucked up people do any of the things they do? Because they’re evil or fucked up.’

Frank’s real enemy is another journalist, Wil Barnes, whose columns are almost invariably about Frank’s peccadilloes. And yet this ‘little prick’, which is how Frank usually refers to him, uses operational methods and techniques which mirror those of Frank. With these figures at the centre of the narrative, along with many others demonstrating equally ambivalent moral stances, notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ seem irrelevant. The use of children here and there in the narrative suggests that there is nonetheless a notion of innocence, but it’s an innocence that gets compromised (at best) by events.

There are other narrative and stylistic factors which put this story firmly in the ‘Leonard school’. From the shocking hook of its opening chapter, the pace is unrelenting. It’s movie-ready, cutting fast from instant to instant, keeping everything in the ‘now’, never dwelling too long on any episode. The narrative takes us right into the middle of a pre-existing set of people and circumstances, all alive, vibrant, busy. We jump from setting to setting, seeing things which are happening simultaneously in different places to different people. It’s making use of the confused, fractured nature and texture of reality.

And then there’s the dialogue – sharp, witty, natural – all of it in the moment. Frequently, the end of a chapter is marked by a sharp one-liner. On one occasion, for example, Frank’s wife Marci says something nasty about Judge O’Bryan. Frank says ‘Jesus, I always thought you liked him’. She replies ‘I do. But none of us is perfect. You should hear what I really think of you’.

Cliff-hangers abound and they’re varied. As well as those involving specific threats or actions, there are the more subtle ones, as when Marci tells Frank that she intends to file for divorce. Frank walks out onto the deck and sees a seagull on the bow of the boat moored at their dock. He decided that ‘if the gull stayed in place for at least the next five seconds, everything would be okay. Starting his slow, even count, he got as far as three’.

This book satisfies the criteria for both crime (UK) and mystery (USA) novels, which aren’t always the same. It has interesting characters, clear settings, great dialogue, page-turning pace and teases at the reader’s own attitudes to morality. OK, it isn’t by Leonard, but it may well be a sort of homage to the master.