Sirens by Joseph Knox

I had heard a lot about Sirens upon its publication, read quite a few rave reviews, but hadn’t got around to reading it. Eventually I picked up a copy, mainly because it’s main character was an undercover police officer infiltrating an organised crime ring - undercover policing and organised crime being issues that I’m interested in. And wow. 

Sirens is an amazing book and deeply original. Our protagonist is Aidan Watts, a deeply troubled Detective Constable who’s been suspended from duty. As such he’s been thrown a lifeline by his superior: go undercover in the seedy backstreets of Manchester to infiltrate the operation of a drug lord, Zain Carver. So far, so average one might conclude. But the author elevates what might be a familiar plot through several original threads.

For one, the author is not a former police officer himself. These days readers are exacting in their demands for accuracy, unforgiving when an author makes a mistake in police procedure. Faced with this an author can go one of two routes: conduct copious research or find another way. The problem with research is unless the author is a police officer themselves, they still might make a mistake. Alternatively, as some authors do, they might fill their books with pages and pages of mind-numbing detail. Joseph Knox, the author, takes the other route. By having his protagonist suspended and recruited off the books, for a deniable operation, he’s able to tell his tale while avoiding getting bogged down in all that tedious detail. This isn’t a criticism, far from it, for what we have here is a slick, fast moving tale, full of tension where Aidan is at risk from nearly everyone he meets and has none of the safety net an undercover officer run in the traditional way might have.

A second interesting strand are the “Sirens” of the title. Zain Carver attracts troubled young women, runaways and those from broken homes and these he uses to collect the proceeds of his drug distribution from Manchester’s bars and clubs. Aidan meets a few these women who are all fragile and vulnerable in their own way and these characters add a certain frisson to the narrative. They also lead to a major sub-plot, for one of these women is the daughter of a leading politician who pulls strings to undermine the drugs investigation and have Aidan watch his daughter instead. This leads to an intriguing foil of tension between his boss in the police, who wants him to focus on the drugs, and the politician who wants his focus elsewhere.

A rival gang made up of vagrants and drug addicts adds yet another layer of tension, but it’s the Manchester that the author conveys that really brings this novel alive. There’s a cliché about crime fiction that it’s all about a sense of location. I don’t believe that myself, I’ve read many a good crime novel that could have been set anywhere, while similarly I’ve read many that attempt to instil a sense of place and come off no better than cheap travelogue. When crime fiction gets sense of place right however, it can be magical. The author of Sirens gets it right; Manchester here is a bleak place, its austerity inflicted wounds still to heal.

All this said, I’ve often struggled to define in my own mind what makes a good book, how one author will write a novel that seems original and fresh and another will write something that seems pedestrian and humdrum. As I’ve written before in other reviews, I think in the end it comes down to a certain fairy dust, a magical ingredient that is hard to put one’s finger on, that is in the quality of the author’s writing itself. So, in conclusion, I’m saying that Sirens has that magic fairy dust and it’s for that reason I recommend it.

5 out of 5 stars

Rubicon by Ian Patrick

Both police corruption and undercover policing are subjects that I’m very interested in. As a former current affairs journalist with Channel 4 Dispatches I didn’t work on any programmes which touched on these subjects myself, but I have had the great honour over the years to get to know several journalists who have, not least Michael Gillard and Laurie Flynn who wrote the masterpiece that was Untouchables, a book that blew the lid on corruption in the Met in the 1990’s. So, when I saw that Fahrenheit Press, one of the finest small independent publishers in operation today, were bringing out a novel written by a former Met undercover officer, I was more than intrigued. When I read the book’s blurb and saw that it also addressed issues of corruption, I knew I had to get myself a copy.

Rubicon’s protagonist is Sam Batford, a veteran undercover officer with Met. He’s been seconded to the National Crime Agency (NCA), onto a team run by DCI Klara Winter, which is targeting an upper echelon crime figure called Vincenzo Guardino. Guardian is bringing in a large shipment of cocaine and Mac-10 machine pistols and Klara is determined to bring him to justice. She is not happy with Sam Batford’s deployment, suspicious of the Met’s motives - are they trying to claim the glory of Guardino’s demise for themselves? - and wary that he might not be answerable to her but to his masters in Scotland Yard. 

A lot of other reviewers writing about this book have focused on Batford’s corruption, portraying the novel as quite a straightforward contrast between his moral duplicity and Klara Winter’s rectitude. For me Rubicon was more nuanced than that. While I started off believing Batford to be corrupt, as the narrative span out I quickly found myself in a hall of mirrors unsure just how much of his actions had been sanctioned by his superiors and why. Even at the close of the narrative, while I had concluded that he was corrupt, was he so out of greed or due to fear that he would be hung out to dry, that he needed a nest egg so to speak? Rubicon is written in contrasting styles - first person for Batford and third person for Klara, whose narrative thread is also told through the official reports she logs. Batford’s strand is by far the strongest, Klara being a more straight forward character, but this works for the majority of the novel is told through Batford.

As with any novel written by an author who’s “been there and bought the T-Shirt”, there’s a fair amount of authenticity here. There’s good detail on surveillance - for example, the unmarked cars that one sees racing up the motorway with the light’s blaring from their grills? Quite possibly a surveillance vehicle leapfrogging from one mainline train station to the next. But the best detail is broader brush.  Rubicon is set in the near future, “at a time of austerity and police cuts” as the blurb says, and the narrative addresses how this has impacted the work of undercover officers - how they have less support, less back up. Reading the novel, one has a sense of the author’s anger, that he’s experienced this himself in his own deployments or knows of people who have. Equally the relationship between the police and the NCA is telling. A few years back I read an interesting biography - The Interceptor by Cameron Addicott. Addicott was a former Customs investigator who had been hired by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), the NCA’s predecessor. In The Interceptor, Addicott detailed his growing disillusionment with SOCA, which eventually led him to resign in disgust. While that was a biography and Rubicon is a novel, I sense a similar theme here and wonder whether Ian Patrick hasn’t had bad experiences of the NCA when working as an undercover for the Met. Certainly, the NCA don’t come out of Rubicon very well. 

All in all, Rubicon is a fantastic novel and one that I would recommend to anyone looking for a good crime thriller. 

This is a 5 star read.

Unforgivable by Mike Thomas

This is the second in the author’s DC Will MacReady novels, and if anything, it’s better than the first, Ash and Bones, which I also reviewed. Set against a backdrop of a Cardiff on edge - a white boy has been murdered by a gang of smirking Asian youth, cue lots of EDL types protesting every morning on the court’s steps, Antifa opposing them, the police stuck in the middle - a series of bombs explodes across the city. The first hit’s a souk, an annual celebration of multiculturalism held in one of the city’s parks. The second strikes a mosque. There are multiple casualties at each location, fatalities and maimings. Is this the work of far-right extremists? A cell of bombers or a lone wolf like Anders Breivik, or the Brixton bomber, David Copeland? 

I don’t want to give away spoilers, so I will avoid too much discussion of the plot, but needless to say, everything is not all that it seems. What I will say is that MacReady and the other characters in the novel are well drawn and the book itself is tightly plotted. While this is the second in the series, it can be read as a standalone, though you will miss a little of the back story.

Mike Thomas is a former police officer and as such this novel has a real air of authenticity. While Will is the main character, Thomas is obviously aware that a police investigation is a team effort and consequently the supporting cast play big roles. Some writers aiming for authenticity overwhelm their readers with the minutia of their research but Thomas is careful not to do this, so while the novel does have the ring of accuracy to it, this is not laboured.

Unforgivable is a police procedural and we all know that the bookshelves groan under the weight of such titles. I would say though that the author’s skill as a writer elevates his novel above many of its competitors. For a start this is not a serial killer novel. Also, while MacReady has got a troubled personal life, the author writes well enough to avoid the usual cliche’s. In fact, that’s a feature of the book full stop. Numerous journalists have pontificated in the past over what makes a great book or film, what makes a great crime thriller. For my own part I think it’s a magic ingredient that is difficult to put one’s finger on. So, if one thinks of The Wire, or The Killing, it’s easy to think that it might be a sense of place, or a killer twist. But many books and films have a sense of place or a knockout twist and aren’t so good. Which brings me back to that magic, the elusive fairy dust. Unforgivable is one such novel; while the plot is original enough, there have been books before that have dealt with terrorism and terror-like atrocities, similarly, as noted above, there are innumerable police procedurals with troubled protagonists. But the author writes well and imbues his novel with that something extra.

In short this is a great novel and one that I heartily recommend. Mike Thomas is an author to watch and I look forward to future novels in the MacReady series. But his previous novels (standalones, not Will MacReady novels, and indeed, not police procedurals) are also well worth digging out. In particular, I would challenge anyone to read Ugly Bus and not think it a cult classic. 

5 out of 5 stars