Tag: contemporary fiction

#BookReview Gallowstree Lane (Collins and Griffiths #3) by Kate London @CorvusBooks

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Gallowstree LaneAbout the Book

Please don’t let me die. Please don’t. The final words of teenager Spencer Cardoso as he bleeds out on a London street, his life cut short in a single moment of rage.

Detective Inspector Kieran Shaw’s not interested in the infantry. Shaw likes the proper criminals, the ones who can plan things.  For two years he’s been painstakingly building evidence against an organized network, the Eardsley Bluds. Operation Perseus is about to make its arrests.

So when a low-level Bluds member is stabbed to death on Gallowstree Lane, Shaw’s priority is to protect his operation. An investigation into one of London’s tit-for-tat killings can’t be allowed to derail Perseus and let the master criminals go free.

But there’s a witness to the murder, fifteen-year-old Ryan Kennedy. Already caught up in Perseus and with the Bluds, Ryan’s got his own demons and his own ideas about what’s important. As loyalties collide and priorities clash, a chain of events is triggered that draws in Shaw’s old adversary DI Sarah Collins and threatens everyone with a connection to Gallowstree Lane…

Format: Hardcover (368 pages)         Publisher: Corvus
Publication date: 7th February 2019 Genre: Crime

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My Review

I haven’t read either of the previous two books in the series – Post Mortem and Death Message – but Gallowstree Lane worked perfectly well as a standalone, although when I get the chance I’d like to go back and read the first two.

Given the series title, I assumed (Sarah) Collins and (Lizzie) Griffiths were a team but in fact it turns out their paths have crossed only briefly in the course of previous cases. However, through different routes they find themselves both involved in finding the murderer of Spencer Cardoso: Sarah as Senior Investigating Officer on the case and Lizzie through the arrest of Spencer’s friend, Ryan, for a seemingly unrelated crime. The trail leads to a gang leader who is the subject of a major organized crime investigation led by Detective Inspector Kieran Shaw.

The book provides a vivid picture of gang culture and how young men, often from deprived backgrounds, can be drawn into drugs, petty crime and violence by manipulative individuals, with often tragic outcomes. Sadly, the latter can just become one more statistic, or a brief mention in a newspaper. As Sarah observes, ‘The specifics of the dead boys did not generally capture the public’s imagination. These were, in the main one-act dramas and not very good ones either; no complication, no twist to make them interesting, no learning for the persons involved.’ In some respects, Detective Inspector Shaw shares this view but only because he is single-mindedly focused on the major operation he is running. ‘His business was to catch the proper bad guys.’

I think it shows the skill of the author to make Ryan, the witness to the murder of his friend, in any way a sympathetic character. He’s a young man traumatised by what he saw and plagued with guilt for running away.  He finds himself in a situation he can’t control and is pitifully loyal to those who view him in reality as no more than a useful tool in their criminal enterprises.

The book contains meticulous detail about police procedure, no doubt gleaned from the author’s time in the Metropolitan Police Service: the extensive paperwork, the often repetitive tasks, the painstaking attention to detail, the frustration when progress is slow, the black humour, and the adrenaline rush of the sudden breakthrough when ‘the trance of assessment and action that every police officer learns’ takes over. I liked the way the book shows the impact of the role on officers’ personal lives, whether that’s the long shifts, the unsocial hours or the traumatic scenes that linger long in the memory. And, as the story progresses we see just how much of a multi-disciplinary effort an investigation can be and what impact the use of modern technology can make (although it may make you more on the look out for CCTV cameras as you stroll down your local street).

I thought Gallowstree Lane was a cracking police procedural. It kept me hooked until the final pages and I’m only sorry it’s taken me so long to get around to reading it.

My thanks to Corvus for my review copy via Readers First. Gallowstree Lane is the final book in my 20 Books of Summer 2021. Phew, made it!

In three words: Gritty, compelling, authentic

Try something similar: Payback (DI Charley Mann #1) by R.C. Bridgestock

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Kate London 1 credit Tim FlachAbout the Author

Kate joined the Metropolitan Police Service in 2006. She finished her career working as part of a Major Investigation Team on the Metropolitan Police Service’s Homicide Command. She now writes full time. (Photo credit: Publisher author page)

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#BookReview Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller @PenguinUKBooks

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Unsettled GroundAbout the Book

What if the life you have always known is taken from you in an instant? What would you do to get it back?

Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different from other people. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. Their rented cottage is simultaneously their armour against the world and their sanctuary. Inside its walls they make music, in its garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance.

But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining down. At risk of losing everything, Jeanie and her brother must fight to survive in an increasingly dangerous world as their mother’s secrets unfold, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake.

This is a thrilling novel of resilience and hope, of love and survival, that explores with dazzling emotional power how the truths closest to us are often hardest to see.

Format: Hardcover (289 pages)         Publisher: Fig Tree
Publication date:  25th March 2021 Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction

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My Review

I read Bitter Orange back in 2019 and described it as ‘intense, atmospheric, unsettling’. Intense and unsettling are descriptions that could equally be applied to the author’s latest book, if not more so. Just have a close look at the cover and you’ll discover that what initially looks like a collection of flowers and fruits actually conceals a picture of decay.

The sudden death of Dot, their mother, leaves Jeanie and Julius bereft and unsure of what the future holds for them, living as they do on the margins of society. Fairly quickly they discover that their mother was not quite the person they thought she was as secret after secret comes to the surface.  That knowledge forces them, especially Jeanie, to reconsider the people they thought they were as well, to rewrite their own history.

I liked the perceptive way the book dealt with bereavement, and how the awareness of the absence of a person can strike without warning. At one point, while Julius and Jeanie are playing music as a duo rather than a trio as they formerly would have, Jeanie hears their mother’s banjo ‘like a vacancy in the music; the sparring and blending between the three instruments is missing, her voice absent.’ Jeanie wonders if this is how loss happens – ‘eventually after every activity has been carried out once without Dot’s presence – the potting on of tomatoes, the making of a rabbit pie, the playing of each song, Jeanie will no longer notice her mother is gone.’

The book is a poignant picture of two vulnerable people lurching from one crisis, one disappointment, to another and ill-equipped to cope with the modern world. They live on the edge of a village with an infrequent bus service, where the telephone box has been converted into a library and the delicatessen stocks foodstuffs that Jeanie and Julius could never afford.  It was heartbreaking to witness Jeanie in the local store counting out her pennies in order to decide if she can buy either toilet rolls or shampoo, or forced to eat condensed soup from the can for want of anything else.

For me, the book was really Jeanie’s story. Although it was clear to see the bond between brother and sister, I felt Julius rather faded into the background and that I didn’t know him in quite the way I did Jeanie; as if, although always present, he was somehow remote. I may not have been completely convinced by the motivation of the person who carries out the dramatic event that takes place towards the end of the book but I could certainly believe in Jeanie’s raw grief at its consequences. Prepare to have this book put you through the emotional wringer but, at the same time, leave you believing there is always hope that tomorrow will be a better day.

Unsettled Ground is book 16 of my 20 Books of Summer 2021.

In three words: Intense, perceptive, poignant

Try something similar: Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves by Rachel Malik

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Claire FullerAbout the Author

Claire Fuller was born in Oxfordshire, England, in 1967. She gained a degree in sculpture from Winchester School of Art, but went on to have a long career in marketing and didn’t start writing until she was forty. She has written three previous novels: Our Endless Numbered Days, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize, Swimming Lessons, which was shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award, and Bitter Orange. Her most recent novel, Unsettled Ground, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021. She has an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Winchester and lives in Hampshire with her husband.

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