Pocket Notebook by Mike Thomas

Mike Thomas is a former police officer. He’s not the first ex-cop to turn his hand to writing, though most of his contemporaries either write biographies or turn to police procedurals. What both groups have in common is an often-rosy portrayal of the police. It is because Thomas appeared to promise the exact opposite which drew me to his books. Pocket Notebook, his first novel, comes with a recommendation from the Independent on the back cover. The book, the Independent says, will become cult reading in police circles but will certainly not be used as a training manual. The front cover certainly supports this assertion, introducing our protagonist, Jacob Smith, as a firearms officer, steroid abuser and foot fetishist.

So what did I find when I opened the book? Did it meet my expectations? Well kind of. While in some ways it exceeded them. The cover gives an idea of the book as a madcap combination of American Pycho and A Clockwork Orange, a version of John Niven’s Kill Your Friends perhaps, but set in the world of the boys and girls in blue, rather than the music biz of the 1990’s. It undoubtedly has elements of those three. For example late in the book there’s a hilarious scene where Smith is caught by his best friend, masturbating in the shoes of the best friend’s daughter, who he’s become obsessed with. But the novel is also richer than this. As with American Psycho, A Clockwork Orange and Kill Your Friends, there has to be more than violence and outrageous sex or it’s just infantile. Behind the shock factor, Thomas’ book is a study of a man slowly losing his grip on his sanity; a portrait of what someone who’s defined by their job and status does when all that is stripped away.

A pocket Notebook is a good book; in some ways it’s an excellent novel, funny, riotous, at points sad and poignant. It’s written with an assuredness that is impressive in a debut. If I have one criticism, it is that it strays quite early on from its USP. One of its selling points is that Jacob Smith is a firearms officer; there’s a frisson that a man amidst a meltdown is carrying a Glock. But very early in the novel he’s stripped of that role and is thrown back on the beat and I felt that this cheated the reader somehow. On the whole though this is a minor quibble and I would unhesitatingly recommend this book.

     

I would give this book 4 out of 5 stars

Zero Zero Zero by Roberto Saviano

Roberto Saviano dedicates his book to his police bodyguards, for he’s a writer in that small and exclusive club: one with a target on his back. While Salman Rushdie, another famous alumni of the club, dared to say something critical about, Saviano took on Camorrah in his previous bestseller Gamorrah. His previous book was a passionately angry screed, in part based on his own personal experiences, against the Neapolitan mafia that were poisoning his home town of Naples. His anger dripped from the pages of that tome and so it was with similar expectations that I approached his latest offering, an examination of the international cocaine trade.

Zero Zero Zero is in some ways the better book. It’s more sober, reflecting the author’s own distance from the subject. Before reading the book I saw an interview Saviano did with the BBC’s Hardtalk programme, where he explained that while he couldn’t walk the streets like he used to, his contacts with the police were now ironically better. He said that he was able to interview leading narcotics officers throughout the world and the book certainly reflects both that approach and that level of access. Saviano surveys the cocaine trade from Colombia, through the Mexican cartels and the vicious narco-wars that have wracked that nation, through transit through Africa and into the hands of ‘Ndranghetta, not the most powerful of Italy’s mafias. It’s an impressive achievement and once again he doesn’t shy away from naming names.

The problem is that while Zero Zero Zero is undoubtedly a good book, a great book even, Saviano is increasingly playing in a crowded field. Other writers and journalists have similar levels of access and have written similar works. Don Winslow’s seminal novels The Power of The Dog and The Cartel, describe the tragedy that is modern Mexico in heartbreakingly poetic prose, while a new documentary film Cartel Land is bringing the story to the silver screen. John Dickie has published a number of books on Italy’s mafias, including the ‘Ndranghetta, while the cocaine trade more widely has been covered as far back as Gary Webb in his work the Dark Alliance.

Gamorrah was fresh exactly because Saviano had lived it, walked the streets of Naples, seen where the bodies were gunned down, smelt the fetid air of a countryside polluted by industrial waste ferried down from the north of Italy by a criminal sub-culture so debased that they were happy to poison their own hinterland fro a fast buck. Zero Zero Zero simply can’t compete.

In short Zero Zero Zero is a great book and I award it four stars. It’s just that Gamorah was better.

In Cold Blood by Mark Dawson

Mark Dawson is something of a hero of mine. As an aspiring author myself I am in awe of the amount of work he manages to produce. What’s more it’s all of a consistently high standard. For many years he’s been self-published and has been very successful. Unlike many self-published writers, his books aren’t riddled with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Nor are his stories littered with plot holes. His Beatrix Rose trilogy is the first to be picked up by a mainstream publisher, commissioned by Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer imprint. I find it absolutely amazing that it’s taken a publisher this long to come knocking at his door, his work is that good.

So In Cold Blood, the first in the Beatrix Rose trilogy. Is it any good? Well yes actually, unsurprisingly it is. Beatrix is a super-assassin; think a female equivalent of Jason Bourne, albeit less the amnesia, angst and moral compunction. By that I don’t mean she’s psychopathic in some way, more that she has a laser like focus on her objectives, which in this trilogy is revenge. We were first introduced to Beatrix in Dawson’s earlier works, which centred on an assassin named John Milton. Beatrix was employed by Group 15, the same unit as Milton, and was a contemporary. The back-story to her own trilogy is that she was betrayed by Control, the head of Group 15, her husband murdered, her daughter taken away from her. In Cold Blood picks up the plot a good few years later, Beatrix is reunited with her daughter and they are in hiding in Marrakech where she plots her revenge on Control and the agents he sent after her family.

In Cold Blood sees our heroine receive help from the new head of Group 15 as she plots her revenge. She discovers that one of the agents sent to kill her is a hostage of pirates in Somalia and off she goes. I don’t want to say anymore about the plot at risk of divulging spoilers, but needles to say there follows a lot of high-octane mayhem and violence.

Mark Dawson develops Beatrix’s character well. We have a real sense of her motivations and her burning desire to avenge the injustice done to her family. He is also very good at evoking a sense of place. I don’t know how well travelled he is but I found his description of Marrakech and a refugee camp in Kenya convincing. Later in the novel, his description of Somalia is equally compelling. With a character like Beatrix with the skill-set she has, there is always a danger that slip into caricature, a two-dimensional Rambo type figure, unstoppable, mowing down baddie after baddie. The author avoids this and while the reader knows she has to survive (after all this is the first in the trilogy) he manages to still ingrain a sense of peril.

I award this book 5 stars

The Murders at White House Farm by Carol Anne Lee

Before reading this I only had a sketchy idea of the events of 7th August 1985 at White House Farm. I knew that on that night a whole family had been brutally murdered – father, mother, daughter and her two young children. I knew that a young man, Jeremy Bamber, the son of the elderly couple who owned the farm, was eventually tried for the murder, convicted, and has been protesting his innocence ever since. It was one of those notorious cases that resonate, like the Moors’ Murders and that of the Yorkshire Ripper, and unsurprisingly Jeremy Bamber has become something of a hate figure for the tabloid press.

Beyond that I knew snippets: something about a silencer with paint on, Bamber’s assertions repeated by his vocal band of supporters that movement had been spotted from within the house when Bamber was outside with the police, that he claimed that it was his sister, Sheila, an erratic and mentally unstable schizophrenic, who fired the shots.

Carol Ann Lee has form; she seems to like delving into the darkest recesses of the human psyche. I’ve only read one of her previous works, an exhaustive investigation into the mind and motivation of Myra Hindley. It was powerful but disturbing stuff, definitely not for the weak hearted. But it was also fair and balanced. One thing I applauded about that earlier work is how she refused to allow the wool to be pulled over her eyes. Many of Hindley’s supporters argue that she was led astray by the evil mind of Ian Brady. While acknowledging Brady’s psychopathology the author demonstrated that Hindley herself had many questions to answer, that on numerous occasions she had shown irritation and contempt towards the relatives of her victims.

So the author has the credentials and gravitas to tackle a case as sensitive as the murders at White House Farm, a massacre that in some ways is more controversial than the Moor’s Murders, for there has never been any doubt as to Brady and Hindley’s guilt. Does she manage it? I think she does. The Murders at White House Farm is as exhaustive account as her previous work, perhaps as definitive an account of what happened that night that we can ever hope to get. The author delves into the family and its wider milieu; she places Jeremy and Sheila’s upbringing under a microscope (the siblings were adopted) she pores over their tensions and schisms. Carol Ann Lee subjects the murder scene, police investigation, forensic evidence and trial to meticulous examination and while there is some evidence that Sheila had religious mania and was a seriously unwell woman the narrative of this tome comes back to one subject: Jeremy himself.

Jeremy Bamber does not come out of this book well, should he read it he won’t be pleased. He comes across as a cold, calculating and money obsessed psychopath, a man who resents his adopted parents for tying him to the farm, not allowing him to lives his own life, and most of all, not providing him with the monies to do so. He poses as heartbroken by his family’s graveside only to smile when the press has gone. He refers to Sheila’s children as a burden and thinks their father Colin should be grateful that he killed them. In prison he appeals and appeals, perhaps having convinced himself of his own innocence, but his efforts come to nothing, as there is nothing to be found.

One thing that did surprise me was the admissibility in court of the silencer. Rather than the police it was relatives who found it. The author’s account makes clear that they repeatedly handled it and didn’t immediately alert the police to its presence. Even once they were alerted to it, the police were slow to seize it and place it in evidence. There’s little evidence of conspiracy here and the author demonstrates that the anomaly is more than likely down to police procedure of the time, the issue does demonstrates a fascinating difference between US and UK law. In the US legal system there is a concept of The Fruit of The Poisoned Tree, whereby evidence is struck out if it was accumulated in a questionable way. My understanding is that the UK legal system does not recognise this concept. So while one might wonder about the chain of custody that doesn’t appear to have unduly concerned the court, either then or since.

At no point does Carol Ann Lee give her opinion as to Jeremy’s guilt, rather she lets the evidence speak for itself. On the basis of what I’ve read in The Murders at White House Farm there’s little doubt. I’m sure Jeremy and his supporters will condemn this book but for those with an open mind this is a magisterial and forensic account.     

I would give this book 5 out of 5 stars

Blood Salt Water by Denise Mina

I haven't read a book by Denise Mina since her novel, The Field of Blood, which was the first in her Paddy Meehan trilogy. I really enjoyed that book and don't know why I haven't read the rest of the trilogy, yet alone any of her other books, I just never seemed to get around to it.

Which leads me to Blood, Salt, Water, which is her latest. And wow! What a read! This is apparently the fifth featuring her protagonist Alex Morrow and on the strength of this I might have to go back and read the other four, and then finish her Paddy Meehan trilogy, and then read everything else she has written. Alex Morrow is a well rounded character, as are all the other people to feature in the novel, but what most excites me about this book is the story itself.

So many crime novels feature a serial killer or some variation of the theme. In fact, if memory serves me right, the Paddy Meehan novel I read had one. Quite frankly, I am tired of reading novels with deranged or psychotic killers murdering women or children in increasingly hideous way. Apart from the fact that real life serial killing is rare and that when it does occur the murders tend to be committed in less arcane and complex ways than those portrayed in pulp novels, there’s something a little sordid, a little sensationalist, a little voyeuristic about our obsession with what is quite frankly horrific crimes. This unedifying spectacle isn't helped by the fact that so often writers reduce their victims to what is little more than a carcass. So what is their left for someone who loves crime fiction but doesn't want to read about the antics of some psycho who wears other people’s skin? Gangsters? Yeah, but often that sinks into Mockney parody.

 A way through this dilemma is shown by Denise Mina in her latest book. Taking care not to give away any spoilers, the novel centres on an investigation into a drug dealing and money laundering gang. Through her description of Morrow watching surveillance footage we get to know the main target of this investigation, a woman called Roxanna Fuenticilla, in quite intimate detail. Which is important because she then disappears. Another character we get to know, again quite intimately, is a local thug who’s just killed and dumped a woman in a lake. These plot strands eventually come together thanks to a sinister professional criminal (and not who the reader thinks it’ll be, this books keeps you guessing until the end).

What Denise Mina achieves, and does it with quite extraordinary aplomb, is to humanise almost all the participants in this crime novel. There's no pantomime serial killing and none of the characters are mere one-dimensional victims. The plot itself is quite ingenious, but what sets it apart is that you end up having at least some sympathy for all the major characters, even those who aren't exactly very nice.

All in all this is a fantastic read and have no hesitation in awarding it 5 out of 5 stars.