American Dreams by Kenneth Bromberg

The first thing to note about this historical crime/family saga from the new publisher Flame Tree Press is its cover. I mean, wow, is that a cover. It’s not just this book either, I’ve seen several titles from Flame Tree Press and they put a lot of thought into their covers. In an increasingly crowded literary field, with traditional publishers having to compete with each other, with hybrid publishers, and self-published titles, anything to get a book noticed is more important than ever. Flame Tree Press publish hardbacks, paperbacks and digital versions of their books, but even on digital, a cover is massively important. If the cover art doesn’t scream out at potential buyers from the Amazon Kindle, Nook or iBooks storefront then it’s easily overlooked. So Flame Tree Press are to congratulated, for their covers, not least for this novel, are a thing of wonder.

The cover of American Dreams isn’t just great cover art, it also speaks to what the story is about. Its artwork of the Statue of Liberty cradling a Tommy gun tells you that this will be a novel about immigrants to America (for certainly at the turn of century when people would arrive by boat at Ellis Island, the eponymous statue would be the first thing they would see) and how some might get involved in organised crime (is there anything more indicative of the mafia wars at the time than the Tommy gun?). And indeed this is what American Dreams is about. 

Max is just four when his Jewish family is massacred in an anti-semitic pogrom in Czarist Russia. His father is his sole surviving relative, and together they flee into Europe, and from there they sail to the United States. Jonathan Cahill is the son of an IRA man about to be hanged. Visiting his father in prison, he is surprised when his father begs him to travel to America to make a life for himself rather than join the struggle. This he does and relatives take him in. Max and Jonathan grow up in New York and their paths cross as both try to make their way in the world.

American Dreams’ title is literal. The two are immigrants who came to the United States for the same reasons that immigrants have always gone there and still do to this day: in the hopes of making a better life for themselves, in effect to chase the American Dream. And like generations before and since, some make it and some have fallen by the wayside. And of those who make it, some do so legitimately, some illegitimately, and many achieve a messy combination of the two. Like all walks of life, organised crime in the United States has often mirrored trends in migration. There have been Jewish, Italian and Irish mobsters. Currently, Latin American gangs such as MS13 are the bogeymen. Of course, the vast majority of these communities don’t get involved in crime, but this novel is a crime/family saga and so it tells the story of that minority who do.

There’s something of the Godfather to this sweeping novel. This is a narrative the timeframe of which is generations, with a cast of characters to match. Apparently, the author found inspiration in stories of his own family passed down from his grandmother. It’s an involving tale that has the full gamut of experience: love, life, and death. All in all, it’s an intriguing tale well told.

4 out 5 stars

The Closer I Get by Paul Burston

This is a novel about an author, Tom, who is stalked by a reader, Evie. It’s also a story about social media and how easy and pernicious cyberstalking and cyberbullying are. Finally, it is a novel about how we construct our sense of self, how social media has both made this easier, and more fragile and vulnerable to a track by others. The Closer I Get is a psychological thriller and as such it makes great use of the unreliable narrator. While Tom is a victim, and Evie his abuser, we are never entirely sure whether everything is as it seems.

Before starting this novel I had already read that the author, Paul Burston, had himself been a victim of online harassment and stalking. Indeed his own experiences are as harrowing as those he describes in his novel. This makes The Closer I Get incredibly harrowing, emotional authenticity weaves through its pages. That said, having been a victim himself, it would have been incredibly easy, perhaps even tempting, for him to write a thriller where the difference between victim and abuser was stark. He could have portrayed Tom as entirely sympathetic and Evie as complete evil. But Burston is too canny an author to do that and instead he crafts incredibly complex characters. Tom is far from perfect and instead is a man of many flaws, while Evie is far from the cartoon caricature of a Glen Close Bunny Boiler straight out of Fatal Attraction.

This is a nuanced and chilling novel that will stay with the reader and one that will have anyone who reads it think twice about their engagement on Twitter or Facebook. Unless you’re a hermit with no social media presence, this is a book that will stay with you.

4 out of 5 stars

Legacy: Gangsters, Corruption and the London Olympics by Michael Gillard

In late 2007 I was employed as an investigative researcher for National Geographic television. I was working on a programme on the global trade in counterfeit products, everything from fake automobile parts to fake medicines. One such research trip was to Milan. The reason I travelled there was to look into the grip the Camorra held over the city, and in particular, its port. Milan’s port is a hub of container traffic, and like all such centres of global trade, smuggling is a real issue. Travelling into Scampia, the crime-ridden housing estate in Campania that has been the site of many shootings, I had to be discreetly escorted at all times by private detectives. Whether this was absolutely necessary, or the channel covering its backside in case of financial liability, I can’t really say. I suspect the latter. But regardless, the feel of a locale outside of the state’s control was very real.

Of course, I digress, for the point of this anecdote is that upon my return to the UK, I experienced something I often felt when returning from research trips to such places: relief at being home, yes, but also I’m ashamed to say, a certain smugness. For what are British values? What do we mean by Britishness? This is a question that is asked increasingly these days by the likes of Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage. They speak of British values as something immigrants might lack. These values are often ephemeral, but when nailed down they relate to a sense of fair play, of order, of a lack of corruption. Things that happen over there, in those countries near the equator, couldn’t possibly happen here. We roll our eyes at tales of Greek economic woe, of the dire state of Italian politics. At the corruption of their police and courts. And yes, I admit it, this view is as hard-wired into my psyche as anyone else’s.

Occasionally, however, something comes around to prick this balloon of collective national bullshit. Just after the dawn of the millennium, two books were published on the Metropolitan Police’s fight against corruption within its ranks. The first was Bent Coppers by the BBC’s Graeme McLagan. The second was Untouchables by Michael Gillard and Laurie Flynn, two former Guardian journalists. Broadly speaking, Bent Coppers argued that the corruption had been a blip and one that the police had dealt with. Move on, nothing to be seen here, the status quo returned. Gillard & Flynn’s, on the other hand, was a longer and more in-depth volume. It was also far more disturbing. Not only did it argue that the Met had failed to root out corruption, it argued that those tasked with doing so were themselves corrupt, albeit in different ways. This was a book that dared to challenge the cozy view we British have of ourselves and our country. Sorry, the authors basically said, we’re not better at this than those foreigners. Our country is just as mendacious, just as corrupt.

Since then, Gillard has kept at it. Freelancing for the Sunday Times and Private Eye amongst others, over the years he’s made a career of harrying those in power and with vested interests, unearthing the stories they would rather remain buried. With this latest book, Legacy, he equals Untouchables in wading through the bullshit of national myth. For as with police corruption, the British don’t like to believe that there are untouchable crime lords walking the land. Such figures are for other countries: the US with its Five Families, third world nations with their cocaine cartels, corrupt countries like Italy, and in particular the island of Sicily, with its infamous mafias. But not Britain with its honest bobbies who would put a stop to such nonsense, oh no. The Krays and Richardsons are once again seen as a blip, and while we logically know there is organised crime in the UK, the Adamses have been reported on over the years, after all, generally, we kind of collectively ignore it.

But before we go on to Legacy itself, the book to which this review relates, we need to recap some history. In 1999 an intriguing article was published in the Observer. Titled “London’s new Kray’s take Soho,” it told of the “Hunt gang”, which it depicted as a vicious gang of criminals who controlled east London in the same way that the notorious Adams crime family controlled the north of the city. The article’s author, Tony Thompson, didn’t identify the gang further than this, he didn’t name David Hunt. But he did tell of how this gang had seized control of the Soho sex trade through violence and intimidation. A further five years later the same author wrote a second piece, also for the Observer. This article detailed the publication of a novel, Judas Pig, by a gangster writing under a pseudonym. This novel was set to blow the lid on gangland and expose his former partner, a very violent criminal. Though this second article didn’t name the Hunts at all, it wasn’t long before the talk on internet forums was linking them, and in particular outing David Hunt as “Danny”, the evil character at the centre of the novel.

In the years that followed Judas Pig became something of a cult success. While Danny was quickly named as David Hunt, the identity of the novels’ author, Horace Silver (Billy Abrahams in the pages of the book) was a subject of much speculation. In some ways why Judas Pig became such a phenomenon is difficult to understand. It’s not a particularly well-written book. It doesn’t have a coherent narrative to speak of. There are no sympathetic characters whatsoever. Even the “hero”, Billy Abrahams (the author himself as the novel is a Roman á Clef) is a deeply unpleasant and vindictive human being. The violence is extreme. These are racist, misogynistic, misanthropes; psychopaths and sociopaths to a man.

But that all said, there was something honest about the book. Ninety percent of what passes for true crime is unforgivable rubbish. Apart from the first book ever to be written about the Krays, John Pearson’s The Profession of Violence, virtually ever other text written about them has been hero worship and hagiography. The same goes for all the titles written about Mad Frankie Fraser, Freddie Foreman, and Joey Pyle. These books are dire. They whitewash their subjects crimes under a thin veneer of explanation. There’s a certain publisher (not Bloomsbury, the publisher of Michael Gillard’s book) that specialises in this nonsense. Churning out titles by so-called celebrity gangsters and football hooligans. And this was what the author of Judas Pig set out to correct, even stating so in the few interviews he gave before going into hiding. Criminals really were scum, was his message. And his book was proof.

The years went by and Judas Pig had sunk into obscurity. The publisher had gone out of business and while Horace Silver self-published the title once again, and brought out a follow-up, The Charity Committee (which was soon taken down by Amazon after threats from Hunt’s lawyers) on the whole it was forgotten. It was kept alive however on a true crime forum where its adherents spent hours trying to work out Horace’s real identity. At one point they concluded the author was really J.J. Connoly, the author of the brit crime novel Layer Cake.

Hunt had similarly returned to the shadows, though he was named occasionally. Roughly the time of Judas Pig’s original publication, Michael Gillard and Laurie Flynn brought out their book Untouchables. Amongst its pages, Hunt and his gang made the occasional appearance, something that was not lost among the denizens of the Judas Pig forum. And there the story would have ended. Hunt shunned publicity like any other organised crime figure worth his salt. Horace Silver had disappeared. While those obsessed with the book were busy chasing their tales. 

But then Michael Gillard struck once more.

Titled Taxpayers Fund Land Purchase from Crime Lords, the article he wrote for the Sunday Times explained how a strip of land in Newham had soared in value in the run-up to the Olympic games. Various crime families were vying for the land and were in conflict. He named names, most notable Terry Adams and David Hunt. David Hunt sued for libel. He lost and both the Sunday Times and Gillard were vindicated. An aside here is that the libel trial finally revealed to the world the identity of the author of Judas Pig, a man named Jimmy Holmes. In the years that followed Gillard penned a number of articles digging deeper into Hunt’s past but it wasn’t until this book’s publication that the whole story could be told.

There are three strands that run through Legacy. The first is that of David “Mac” McKelvey. What a tabloid might call an “old school copper”, he was a Detective Inspector in Newham who headed up the Borough Crime Squad and dared to take on Hunt in the early noughties. Despite Hunt being a criminal of national importance, who’s reach was international, David’s local Crime Squad became a thorn in his side and came closer to bringing him down than the national squads such as SOCA or its successor, the NCA (often referred to as Britain’s answer to the FBI).

The second strand, which I found to be the most fascinating, is an account of Hunt’s rise to power. These chapters will also be of most interest to those Judas Pig cultists who were so obsessed with the book online. (Please note, this is only a slightly disparaging description, for while I didn’t post to the forums myself, I did read them avidly, and admit to having had great interested in the book and the story behind it). Finally, those interested in the tale will have their answers. Gillard details the story of David Hunt and Jimmy Holmes's partnership in-depth and clears up a number of issues. For a start, it becomes apparent that the events of Judas Pig and its sequel, the Charity Committee, overlapped somewhat. Then there is the incident detailed in the book where acid is thrown in the face of a police officer. In Gillard’s later work - the article, the libel trial, etc - it became apparent there was concern that Hunt had corrupt officers in his pocket. I always wondered how they would countenance working with him when his gang was assaulting police so viciously. But it turns out this event was early on in Hunt’s career when he was just starting out and before he and Holmes were established in Soho, so before the events of Judas Pig.

But this second strand of the book will be of interest to far many more people than just those who read and obsessed over Judas Pig. For a start, there is Soho itself. In the fifties, sixties, and seventies, Soho was synonymous with vice and crime. Then it was supposedly cleaned up. There is a myth now, long-established, that Soho is now nothing more than a gentrified theme park, an area of advertising and marketing firms and fancy restaurants. One could no more find a spieler or gangster here than one could find one on the moon, so the reasoning goes. To a large extent, this is true. Certainly, the area is far cleaner than it was back in the day. And the process is accelerating, what with most people getting their porn online and no longer needing to visit a dank and dark video store.  But I used to drink and party in Soho in the 1990s, and it seemed safe then. Yet we now know, first from the articles penned by Tony Thompson, then by Judas Pig, and finally, and in much more detail, thanks to Gillard, that in fact there was still significant violence and villainy in 1990s Soho. There were illicit fortunes to be had and Hunt and Holmes took them. There are still brothels in Soho to this day (less it has to be said, thanks to enforcement action and trends in the vice industry, but they remain) and one wonders who owns them now and whether a future Hunt and Holmes are battling it out for supremacy.

Then there are the particular details of Hunt’s rise and how similar it is to the street gangs of today. Since the current epidemic of knife crime hit Britain’s streets, commentators have fallen over themselves to explain how different it all is to gangsters of old. Indeed, even Freddie Foreman, the old Kray henchman, said in an interview with the Guardian that the kids of today’s gangs were completely different from his day. But is that really true? The infamous Adams brothers started off by extorting money from market traders (why a journalist of Gillard’s ilk hasn’t penned a proper, journalistic account of the Adams family, I just don’t understand) and from what’s little known of them they were very akin to a street gang back in the day. Hunt’s rise was even more explicit. His organisation was a street gang. They even had a name: The Snipers. They very quickly became more than a street gang, roaming the country to commit robberies, but this is no different from some of the current crop. Take the Tottenham ManDem (TMD) as an example. After Mark Duggan was shot dead by police (police say he was a member of TMD), it emerged in both the IPCC report into the police shooting and the Inquest report, that the Metropolitan Police believed 48 key members of the gang to be some of the most violent gangsters in Europe. Furthermore, like the Snipers before them, the Met says that TMD’s reach now stretches across the country, and internationally, through drug trafficking.  Reading Legacy, it is difficult to see much difference between the TMD and the emerging Snipers, and thus one has to wonder whether the Hunt of the future will emerge from this or another such gang.

The third strand of Legacy details the political and economic corruption Hunt and other crime families in the Newham area have incubated. He paints a picture of a borough riven by corruption, and again this is something that we British don’t like to believe of ourselves. Political corruption is the thing of tinpot dictatorships and banana republics, not the UK. While Gillard makes no suggestion that the rot has spread to Westminster, and I doubt he would deny that the UK’s political system is far cleaner than many countries, that is hardly the point. One could say the same about police corruption and the number of untouchable gangsters, but who are we comparing ourselves to, Mexico? The reality is this stuff exists in Britain, however much we want to deny it. Indeed, it’s dangerous to bury our heads in the sand. Which is what those myths of what it means to be British, of British values, have us do. They stop people from taking these problems seriously. Like my complacent smugness when returning from Camorra infested Naples, even after reading a book like Untouchables or Legacy, the myth lingers. Can it really be as bad as Gillard suggests? Well yes, it can, as the high court found when the evidence was tested. After examining and testing all the evidence, Hunt lost and Gillard and the Sunday Times won.

So, there’s a lot of reasons to buy and read this book. It reveals in painstaking detail the rise of a real-life untouchable gangster, the police corruption that protected him, the political corruption that he and his allies bred. But there’s a further reason to buy this book and it’s this. True Crime is an example of what happens when journalism dies. In the early 1970s, The People newspaper exposed the head of the Flying Squad, Commander Ken Drury, for holidaying in Cyprus with a Soho pornographer. The resulting scandal led to his prosecution for corruption. The People is now a tabloid that regurgitates celebrity gossip and it is difficult to imagine it taking on such a story. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine The People printing any serious story. But the death of journalism has spread further than just one title. The reason most true crime books glamourise their subjects are for two reasons. The first is that such books undoubtedly sell, the second is that proper journalism is expensive and risky, as Gillard’s work will attest. And it’s not just true crime. Real journalism covering sport, royalty, business, politics, all are falling by the wayside. Instead, we have redrafted press releases and puff pieces. One can count the number of proper journalists on the fingers of one hand. 

There is only one solution to this problem: money. Publishers and outlets need to know there is a market for books such as these. That the public wants to read real investigations and is willing to pay for them. Only then will media organisations put their money where their mouths are and take the risk of funding such work. So I implore anyone reading this review to buy Michael Gillard’s book. To tell their friends and family about it. To preach its praises. For only when books such as his fly off the shelves will we see more investigations like these and will more people like David Hunt have their actions exposed to the light.

5 out of 5 stars 

The Fragility of Bodies by Sergio Olguín

In the field of crime fiction, a field that sometimes feels overcrowded, its wonderful to find a book with a great premise. The Fragility of Bodies is one such book. The premise of this novel is very simple and surrounds the death of children on train tracks, e.g. children knocked over by trains. This, of course, happens all over the world. Children (and adults) risk crossing the tracks when the barriers are down at level crossings. Children play at the side of the tracks. Children play on the tracks. Some might try and block the tracks for fun by piling things onto the tracks (which of course can cause a train to derail) or they might make dares, play chicken with each other and the train, etc. This is the premise for this novel, in which Veronica Rosenthal, a young journalist on a news magazine, takes an interest in the number of deaths of children on the Buenos Aires rail tracks.

Many a plot of a novel has come from the question What If? And reading this novel, you can almost see the author asking that question in his mind. What if some of those deaths, deaths that happen around the world, were not accidents? To be sure such deaths happen in poor countries more than rich ones, where safety and security standards are not as good. Also, such deaths in those poor countries are likely to be subject to less rigourous investigation. So it is in this novel. The deaths that are at the core of the narrative are of street children, kids who grew up in the slums of Buenos Aires and come from deprived homes. I’ll avoid spoilers, but needless to say, Veronica discovers that the spate of deaths she’s happened upon are no accidents. She starts to investigate and those that are causing the deaths take umbrage to her sniffing around.

There are two other aspects of this novel that I liked very much. The first is that as a former journalist myself, the way Veronica comes across the story of the deaths on the train tracks is very authentic. Journalists discover stories in many ways and more often than not its almost accidental. You see or hear something which grabs your interest, you look into the story a little more, and then you find something bigger. The most famous example, of course, is Watergate. Initially, it was reported as just a break-in. But then journalists (most notably Woodward and Bernstein) discovered more. There were many (though obviously much less dramatic) examples of this in my own career in current affairs television. We would look into an issue only to find something much bigger beneath the surface. In The Fragility of Bodies it's the suicide of a train driver. He’s left a note expressing remorse for the children he’s killed. Veronica looks into this and discovers he’s referring to children that he ran over when driving his train. Soon she learns that a lot of train drivers on the same line have had similar experiences and her investigation spirals from there. This, as I say, is very realistic to how journalism works. Often a journalist finds one thing, that leads to another, and another, and before they know it the story they are working on is completely different from what they had imagined.

The second aspect of this novel that I very much like is its lack of a serial killer. That probably reads like a really weird thing to write, but bear with me. I’m going to have to be very careful here not to divulge spoilers, and I won’t say anything else about the plot, except to say that the deaths are not caused by a serial killer. To me, that’s excellent, because a real bugbear of mine is the number of serial killers in crime fiction. Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy some serial killer books and films. I’m not saying I’ll never read or watch one again, nor am I saying that I’ll never enjoy one again. When such stories are done well, they can be tremendous. But there is something a little lazy about the number of authors who churn out serial killer stories. Apart from the fact that serial killing is actually incredibly rare, it’s also just not very imaginative. So it's refreshing when one comes across a novel that doesn’t include a deranged psycho killer to push the narrative on. 

My one criticism of this novel is that some of the plot is contrived. Veronica Rosenthal is the daughter of a very powerful and politically connected lawyer. She uses this to find things out and I found this a little grating. It’s almost a get-out-of-jail-free card, the author able to have Veronica find anything, get out of any predicament, by playing this ace. Basically, the author uses this to dodge any difficulties in his plot. This was most obvious in the last quarter of the novel where the action sped up and she started to call in favours with increasing frequency. It felt like the author had pushed himself and his protagonist into a corner and had no way of extricating themselves other than the use of this trick. Personally, I would have kept the pace of the first three quarters and had this a book about the journalists' method. I would have foregone the action at the end and made it more akin to a legal thriller, where the tension is more in the revelations than kinetic violence. 

That said, this is a very good book and one I enjoyed immensely. I would definitely read more by this author and hope that more of his work is translated into English.

4 out of 5 stars 

Underworld: The inside story of Britain’s professional and organised crime by Duncan Campbell

There are two types of true crime writing about gangsters. First, there are the breathless glamourising puff pieces. These are often ghostwritten for celebrity gangsters - some former real criminals, others more wannabes - and one particular publishing house has created a veritable cottage industry in churning these out. Then there is the more serious side of true crime reporting. These tend to be written by serious journalists and steer clear of whitewashing their subject’s sins. Personally, I have no time for the first type and cannot abide by the glamourising “biographies” they produce. I am, however, very interested in the second type, the serious examination of the phenomenon, and Duncan Campbell, the veteran Guardian journalist who has spent much of his career writing about crime, is one of these.   

Campbell first plotted the contours of the criminal underworld for a book back in 1994.  This was a thorough piece of work for its time and this new book is a broad update, mapping the modern criminal underworld of Britain while giving context as to how it developed. It’s all here: starting from the racetrack gangs and smash and grabbers of the late 19th century, the narrative leads through the safecrackers who followed, the war years and crime in the blitz, the Krays and Richardsons, up to the current day. Along the way, there are chapters dedicated to particular subjects so that they might be examined in more depth: the vice rings of Soho, the big robberies such as Brinks Mat and the Hatten Garden heist, police corruption and hitmen. 

There are some revelations here but the book's real strength is the drawing together in one volume of information previously spread out in innumerable other tomes. This is a good survey of gangland Britain. That said, the book does have some shortcomings. Most glaringly is precisely its strength: its breadth. Unfortunately, that means that if a reader knows about a particular subject, this title is frustratingly lacking in depth. For example, one of my interests is police corruption. There are two titles that look at police corruption in the Metropolitan Police, Bent Coppers by Grahame McLagen and Untouchables by Michael Gillard and Laurie Flynn. Having read them both, I found the chapter in Campbell’s book on the subject unsatisfactory.

Then there are the conclusions he reaches. When writing a book like this the author must be under pressure to come up with something new to say and to reach definitive conclusions. I felt that in the latter that he overstretched himself somewhat. For example, in the final chapter, he argues that organised crime gangs eschew publicity and now try to be anonymous, and that marks a change from the Krays who courted the public gaze. But of course it was only the Krays who sought publicity, their rivals the Richardsons were far more camera shy (and indeed far more professional). Similarly, the Nash Family, another crime gang from the period, tried to avoid the limelight. Today, while most crime gangs try to avoid publicity, the Helbaniaz, a major Albanian crime gang, court publicity through YouTube. This leads me to another conclusion he makes which in my opinion doesn’t hold up. He says that crime figures are unlikely to write their memoirs. But then he points to Grime on YouTube where criminals boast and taunt each other and asks what that is if not a memoir. Well, quite. Similarly, when discussing the knife crime to plague the UK at the moment, he implies that the gangs of today are for the most part unlike the crime figures of the past. But are they really? According to the journalist Michael Gillard, David Hunt, the crime lord recently exposed by the Sunday Times, started his career in a street gang known as The Snipers. Similarly, not a few organised crime figures grew out of football hooliganism. Are they that different from the youth gangs of today? Of course, most of the teenagers involved in the postcode violence won’t go on to be crime lords, Campbell is right about that. But equally, most football hooligans didn't in the past. But some of them did and likewise, in thirty years' time, we’re likely to discover that a handful of the current crop has too.

A final issue the author has to contend with, one outside of his control, is his unfortunate timing. Just recently two excellent volumes were published that cast gangland in a new light. The first was Drug War by Peter Walsh. A landmark examination of Customs & Excise's pursuit of drug barons, it was full of revelations on the drug trade and infamous figures such as Mickey Greene. Then there is One Last Job by Tom  Pettifor and Nick Sommerlad. A biography of Brian Reader, one of the Hatten Garden gang (not one of those breathless glamourising biographies that I decry above, but a serious piece of journalism) its narrative was wider than that, examining East End gangland in some detail and thus demonstrating how a figure like Reader could come about. Finally, Michael Gillard’s landmark expose of David Hunt is due for publication in just a matter of days. 

So While Campbell’’s book is an overview and that is its strength, its also a weakness. Its target readership is likely to have read or are likely planning to read some of these other titles, and thus Underworld will suffer in comparison.

In conclusion, Underworld is a great book and is written a by a great writer. I would highly recommend it and hope that this review does not come across as too critical. But unfortunately, in a crowded field, it just can’t help but suffer against its competition. 

3 out of 5 stars

The Accidental Spy by Sean O’Driscoll

In 2003, Michael McKevitt, one time head of the Real IRA, was convicted in the Republic of Ireland for “membership of an illegal organisation” (the Real IRA) and “directing terrorism”. He received a substantial prison term: 20 years. Despite various appeals and attempts to have his convictions overturned, he has failed. How he came to be convicted is told in the Accidental Spy, and was largely the work of one man, David Rupert, an informant who infiltrated the Real IRA under the direction of the American FBI and Britain’s MI5.

This is, in fact, the second book to look at the downfall of Michael McKevitt and the war against the Real IRA. The first book to explore this story was a now out-of-print title, Black Operations, by the journalists John Mooney and Michael O’Toole. This earlier title, while relying on Rupert’s testimony, also looked at the wider context of the Irish and British state’s attempts to crush the Real IRA. The Accidental Spy, meanwhile, is much more focused on Rupert. The author, Sean O’Driscoll, managed to make contact with him despite the fact that he is currently in witness protection, his life at risk from Irish Republicans' wrath. This is not to say that O’Driscoll doesn’t tell Rupert’s story in context, he does, just that this is much more the story of Rupert and how this American trucker came to infiltrate, and almost single-handedly, bring down a terrorist group.

Rupert was at first a reluctant agent. After businesses had gone bust and two marriages had failed he began drinking in an Irish bar in Florida where he had moved to. He quickly became friends with a woman who was a member of NORAID, the IRA supporting organisation in the United States who lobbies for the group and raises funds for them. Through her, he was introduced to other Republicans and soon was on friendly terms with some with dubious contacts. It was then that the FBI came calling. They advised Rupert to work for them, compelled him to really, laying out all they knew about him - the failed businesses and marriages, etc. After some arm-twisting, Rupert agreed, but he soon took to the task with gusto. 

Rupert was and is a big man, both in size and personality, and it wasn’t long before he had inveigled himself within the circles of more and more senior people within the movement. Soon he moved to Ireland, buying a pub with FBI funds and it was here that he quickly became a central figure in the cause, meeting and befriending McKevitt. The FBI introduced Rupert to MI5 and together the two organisations ran him and directed him until he in effect brought down the leadership of the real IRA.

The Accidental Spy and the tale it tells is reminiscent of other books which tell the story of agents and informants recruited amongst terror groups. A good example is Agent Storm, which tells the story of Morton Storm, a Danish former biker gang member who after converting to Islam joined al Qaeda before being recruited by intelligence services to spy on the group. Morton Storm and David Rupert are alike in many ways: both to a lesser or greater extent had fallen off the tracks and had CV’s that were troubled, and both are evidence that the police and intelligence services sometimes have to get their hands dirty and work with people who are far from whiter than white in order to infiltrate and bring down organised crime gangs and terror groups. 

The Accidental Spy is a great book and a story grippingly told. This is a real insight into dissident Republicanism, one man’s extraordinary recruitment as an agent in the heart of a terror group, and a window into the methods the police and intelligence services use to tackle some of the gravest threats our societies face.

5 out of 5 stars

Codename Villanelle by Luke Jennings

As a big fan of Killing Eve, the hit BBC series based on Jenning’s novels, I was keen to read the story that inspired them. Like the series, there are two main protagonists: Villanelle, the Russian born assassin working for a shadowy organisation, The Twelve, and Eve Polastri, an MI5 analyst who becomes obsessed with bringing her to justice. 

Obviously, there are many similarities between the series and book, but there are also some marked differences. Unlike the series (I’m yet to see the latest season, so don’t know if this is still the case), it is much more explicit in the novel that the organisation, The Twelve, that Villanelle works for is not a state organ, that in fact the Russian State also don’t know who they are. While Jennings doesn’t go massively into detail as to who The Twelve are (perhaps he does in later novels) he does go into more detail than the television series, which hardly touches on her employers. This first book also goes into a lot more detail about Villanelle’s background and the training she received after her recruitment.  

But perhaps the biggest difference between the novel and the series is that the novel is far less comic than the television show. Whereas the BBC series is an over the top black comedy, the actor Jodie Comer’s Villanelle often dressed in outrageous or glamorous frocks, the novels are much straighter, much more akin to other thrillers of the spy/assassin genre. This is not a criticism, in many ways reading this novel reminded me of one of the high octane thrillers that did so well recently, such as Terry Haye’s novel, I Am Pilgrim.

There’s a second novel in the series, No Tomorrow, which I definitely intend to read, and a third on the way (Killing Eve: Endgame, with a publication date in 2020). My understanding is that the first two were written prior to the TV adaptation, so it will be interesting to see how Jennings wraps up his story in light of its successful transformation to the small screen.

This is a great read, albeit a more straightforward take on the genre than its TV adaptation. That said, it would be a pity if fans of the genre didn’t read it on that basis, for despite the fact that it doesn’t have the quirky fun of the TV adaptation, this is a compelling and accomplished thriller.    

4 out of 5 stars

The Sleepwalker by Joseph Knox

Joseph Knox’s debut Sirens was one of the most hyped debut crime thrillers of 2017. Introducing his readers to his flawed and deeply corrupt detective Aidan Waits, it was gritty Manchester based tale of corruption and organised crime. Waits returned for a sequel in The Smiling Man, and now he returns once more in The Sleepwalker. In the previous Waits has been consigned to a nightshift patrol, his partner Peter “Sutty” Sutcliffe, an obnoxious and offensive older officer with a compulsion to rub his hands with alcohol gel. In this novel the two are guarding Martin Wick, a notorious child murderer, who lies in hospital at death’s door with cancer. But when someone kills the man by petrol bomb, Sutty is immolated also and has to be put into a drug induced coma. 

With his long-time partner in intensive care, Waits is partnered with Naomi Black, a young and up and coming detective, and told to find out what’s going on. After the events of books 1 and 2, Wait’s is a byword within the force as an officer under a cloud of suspicion. He is ordered to investigate Wick’s killing by Superintendent Parrs, a deeply cynical and manipulative senior officer who uses Waits for off-the-books tasks. So it is that Waits and Black operate a shadow investigation, separate from the official murder inquiry.

Writers of crime thrillers that feature police characters often strive for realism in police procedure. Some such novels are good, but others suffer in my opinion for these efforts. The crime novels I’ve always enjoyed the most are those that manage to get around this and Knox has always done just that. In Sirens he had his character undercover; in The Sleepwalker he exploited Waits and Sutty’s exile to the night shift, Parrs’ use of them to pursue cases that others ignored; in The Sleepwalker he has Waits and Black explicitly tasked with running a shadow investigation. It is to the author’s credit that he crafts his plots with plausibility, and this makes for a fast moving and believable story, a pared down and gritty tale of noir.

The Sleepwalker is likely to be Wait’s third and final outing (I can’t say why for fear of spoilers) and is a brilliant novel, a fantastic end to a gripping and truly impressive trilogy.  Joseph Knox is a novelist of real talent and I can’t wait to read what he writes next.

5 out of 5 stars 

Razia by Abda Khan

This is a novel on a mission. The author, Abda Khan, is a lawyer and women’s rights campaigner with an impressive pedigree: winner of the Woman of the Year Award 2019 and highly commended in the 2017 NatWest Asian Women of Achievement Awards. She clearly cares deeply about issues of domestic slavery, indentured labour and the plight of women around the world (issues around which the plot of this novel revolves) and her knowledge and research shines through.

Farah Jilani is a woman of British Pakistani heritage and a solicitor in a flourishing city firm. They do a lot of immigration work and a lot of their clients are referred to them by Zaheer Mansur, a powerful figure in the Pakistani community. Attending a dinner one night at Zaheer’s house in London, Farah stumbles upon Razia, a poor maltreated woman flown in from Pakistan to serve as the Mansur’s enslaved domestic servant. Farah resolves to help free this woman and seeks the help of the Pakistani High Commission. Eventually Farah manages to gain Razia’s freedom and she is flown home to Pakistan. But Zaheer and his family are a vengeful lot and they are not content to allow their humiliation to go unanswered. Their actions force Farah to fly to Pakistan where she discovers the full scale of indentured servitude in the rural villages of Pakistan.

There’s a lot to like about this novel. As mentioned, the author has clearly done her research and it is obviously a subject she feels very strongly about. Just a quick Google search is enough to persuade the reader, if they were unaware of the issues already, that the situation for indentured labour in Pakistan is as bleak as the author describes. So, too, the reality of life as a domestic slave. Not a few novels and films have tackled the issue of sex trafficking (think of the Liam Neeson film Taken, for example) but very few have addressed domestic slavery, perhaps because it is more hidden. Prostitution, while not exactly out in the open per se, is visible on many inner-city streets, while domestic slavery is behind closed doors. Quite a few of those books and films that have looked at sex trafficking have arguably been exploitative (again, Liam Neeson’s Taken can be seen as an example of this, more an excuse to have Neeson beat up clichéd Albanian gangsters than a sober examination of the issues). Razia is not this, by following Farah’s investigation and pursuit of the truth, the novel gives space to really highlight the issues that are central to the plot.

There is nothing wrong with a novel aiming to address and highlight social issues. Some of the great novels have done just that. The trick is to ensure that the campaigning mission doesn’t get in the way of the plot, and/or is not laid on too thick so as to become a manifesto. On the whole the author manages this and Razia is both a polemic and an enjoyable read. That said, there were points in the narrative where dialogue turned into exposition, the characters spelling out why they were doing something or what a situation meant in ways that didn’t sound natural. Equally, there were occasions where the narrative became a little too clunky and plodding, the author a little too keen to get her message across.

That all said, on the whole this novel worked. It both brought a little-known injustice to the readers’ attention, while remaining an enjoyable thriller. I read this novel over three lazy summer afternoons and it kept me turning the page. Thus, this is a novel that deserves a wide readership and I hope it gets it.

3 out of 5 stars

An Honourable Exit by Thurston Clarke

There are many shameful chapters in history and many shameful wars. Most recently, we have had the ill-fated war in Afghanistan, which perhaps began nobly in the aftermath of 9/11, but which soon morphed into a conflict of ill-defined strategy - was it an exercise in nation building, of anti-terrorism, of drug interdiction? More clearly disastrous, and utterly without justification, was the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And then there’s Vietnam. If any conflict is shrouded in ignominy, it’s arguably America’s war in Vietnam. But in reality, life is never so simple. Whatever the justifications for a given war or intervention, amongst those fighting it might be the brave and honourable. Similarly, some will side with those who history judges to have been in the wrong for all manner of reasons, many not just understandable, but perhaps justifiable also. A good example of this can be seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. Whatever the merits of Western intervention, not a few locals sided with the foreign forces. Many worked for them. And when those forces pulled out, all too often those locals felt abandoned. Interpreters are a case in point. Both the US and UK have faced calls to allow those who assisted their troops seek asylum and many find it shocking how these brave Iraqis and Afghans have felt themselves to be abandoned.

So it is that An Honourable Exit by Thurston Clarke is so relevant. For it tells the story of the efforts by many Americans to help the Vietnamese who assisted them to get to safety. Apart from being a fascinating story in itself, this is also a historical corrective. The abiding image of the American pull out from Saigon after all being one of chaos, of Vietnamese thronging the gates of the embassy compound and watching in impotence as the diplomats inside were evacuated. All this is true, of course. The American withdrawal was chaotic, and those Vietnamese crowding the gates and not being let in were left to their own devices, as were many more. But in this book are the stories, the innumerable stories, of the many efforts to get people out and those they whisked to freedom. 

Many of these efforts were unofficial, American men and women disobeying orders to help people escape. Heroism is an overused word, but some of the stories contained in the pages of this book meet the definition, humanitarian efforts in which the Americans concerned went above and beyond to help those who otherwise might face the wrath of the North Vietnamese to flee. A great example is that of the Consul General of Can Tho, who rather than just fly American personnel out by helicopter (thus abandoning the local Vietnamese to their fate) risked a boat voyage and thus evacuated Americans and Vietnamese allies alike. Or there is Al Topping, the Pan Am employee, who adopted 360 Vietnamese employees and their families and thus enabled them to repatriate to the United States.

But there are other more tragic stories in these pages, of rescue missions that didn’t succeed and those that paid the price. One of the most moving in my opinion is that of Tucker Gougelmann. A former CIA officer who had retired to Bangkok, he had married a Vietnames woman and snuck back into the country after the fall of Saigon to help his family escape. Gougelmann was captured by the Vietnamese and tortured to death, his body returned to the US three years later. A friend later managed to secure his family visas and they settled in the United States, Gougelmann posthumously given a star on the famous memorial wall in CIA headquarters in Langley, despite the fact that his rescue mission was unsanctioned, and he was retired at the time.

With the unpopular interventions of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya offering up similar challenges, An Honourable Exit is a fascinating and timely account of how some Americans rebelled at their nations decision to turn its back on friend and ally. This is very readable and gripping account of honourable people in a dishonourable environment and is highly recommended.

5 out of 5 stars

One Way Out by A. A. Dhand

The fourth outing for Harry Virdee, A A Dhand’s Bradford based protagonist is an explosive one, and that description is apt. The novel opens literally with a massive explosion, a huge bomb exploding under the City Park, the emergency services having evacuated the area with just moments to spare. Harry was in the park with his son and it takes him a little while to discover that the city’s mosques are being held to ransom, a previously unknown far-right group having planted a similar device within one of them, warning that if any worshipper should leave any of them that it would explode. Harry’s wife, Saima, is in one of the mosques and this makes things very personal. The far-right activists just have one demand, that the leaders of the radical Islamist group, Almukhtaroon, are delivered to them. Do that and the congregation of the mosques can go free.

Enter Tariq Islam, the UK’s first Muslim Home Secretary, and a man with a past in an off-the-books special forces unit. Islam asks for Virdee’s help in locating and capturing the Almukhtaroon leaders. The UK government can’t be seen to be giving in to the terrorists demands and thus if the police find the Almukhtaroon people they will be taken into protective custody, if Harry does however, then perhaps the trade can be made secretly. So begins a race against the clock for Harry to locate the Almukhtaroon before thousands of worshippers, and potentially his wife, are obliterated in an explosion. 

After the third Harry Virdee novel, City of Sinners, strayed into serial killer territory (though no worse for it, that novel as with all the others in the series is very good) One Way Out is firmly back in the territory Dhand has occupied before, namely a convoluted plot firmly rooted in the city of Bradford though with geo-political overtones. This perhaps is his most political book, touching on many of the themes that have appeared in earlier works, that far-right and Bradford’s racial tensions for example, but taking them further and tying them deeper into the national, and even international, landscape. If that all sounds heavy and off-putting it shouldn’t. This is a high-octane and thrilling read, one that could easily be read on a beach, but it’s also a cut above, one that has a brain as well as heart.

The author has clearly puta lot of effort into this book too, researching the topics well. Just one example, at the back of the book, he lists a number of fictional aspects to the plot, such as the fictional Almukhtaroon. Another is Group 13, the unit that Tariq Islam was a member of. But while the author says this unit is fictional, it’s one I’d heard of before, a reputed organisation often mentioned on para-political and conspiracy sites. Does it exist or not? Perhaps, perhaps not, but unless Dhand just got lucky, full marks to him for his eclectic research.

Once again, I can’t recommend One Way Out enough and I really hope that Harry Virdee returns once again.

5 out of 5 stars

City of Sinners by A. A. Dhand

This is the third novel in the author’s series of Bradford set crime thrillers, and once more we’re in the company of Detective Inspector Harry Virdee. Harry is a Sikh officer married to a Muslim; a love match that has led both to be estranged from their respective families. He has a complicated relationship with his brother, a crime lord who controls much of the city’s narcotics trade. He’s not averse to bending the rules when a case calls for it. 

All of these ingredients come into play in the plot of City of Sinners which opens with Harry being called to the scene of a murder where a young woman has been suspended by a noose fashioned from barbed wire. Cutting her down, it’s discovered in autopsy that in fact she died from massive anaphylactic shock. Worse still, it soon transpires that the killer meant this murder for Harry himself, that he or she is taunting Harry and meant it as a message.  It isn’t long before there are further killings and the ensures that Harry knows that he himself is being targeted. 

City of Sinners is a departure of sorts for the author and his protagonist. The crimes at the centre of the previous two Harry Virdee novels have included homicides, but they’ve been much more political, much more linked to organised crime. This third outing is Harry’s first brush with a serial killer, and this gives the book a different feel. Similarly, a strong element of Dhand’s writing style has been the sense of place, the sense that his stories couldn’t be told anywhere but Bradford. While this book is geographically very Bradford - for example, that first murder is set in the city’s Waterstones bookstore, which is sited in a converted gothic wool exchange - the sociological aspect is missing in that strip away the landmarks and this tale could be set elsewhere. This isn’t a criticism, City of Sinners is still an extremely good book, and if anything demonstrates the author’s versatility.

There are wider political elements to the story, one’s that are clearly set to reappear in future Harry Virdee novels. The Home Secretary, Tariq Islam, and his dubious past in an off-the-books special forces outfit is one. As is Harry’s brother’s continuing relationship with the narcotics trade. While the convoluted relationship Harry and his wife Saima have with their respective families has a large impact on the plot.

Overall, City of Sinners is yet another brilliant crime novel in A A Dhand’s Harry Virdee crime thrillers, and is with the others, I can’t recommend this book enough.

5 out of 5 stars