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.