The White Crow

A white crow is a bird that is picked on by its own kind at the same time that it’s a target for predators. Philomena (Phil) McCarthy is such a one:  an intelligent cop eager to make the CID but vulnerable to both her colleagues and the criminals who are aiming to destroy her family.

“Organised crime” is a term Phil dismisses although she confesses that the McCarthy brothers are referred to by the media as ‘colourful local identities’ or ‘ex-cons’ but never gangsters because her father has a barrister on speed-dial. For herself she tries to keep a low profile, her life compartmentalized, but where her husband, a fire fighter to whom she is blissfully married (a nice touch) is tolerant, fascinated by her infamous uncles and her formidable father, her boss, a DI, is fiercely suspicious of those family connections and always on the watch for conflicts of interest.

Phil is on shift, on the breakfast run at three o’clock on a rain-swept morning, when her worlds collide. In the middle of ordering her sandwich online (smoked salmon and cream cheese) she glances in her wing mirror and spots a small child standing on the wet pavement in her pyjamas. Now everything happens at once. Simultaneously she gets an urgent message involving a bomb and a violent robbery at a jewellery store while – but this is known only to the participants and the reader - thousands of pounds worth of building equipment is destroyed at the site of a prestigious development. This is not vandalism but sabotage: the ramping up of a fiendish conspiracy to break the McCarthy monopoly. And everything is linked.

Ostensibly Phil’s father, Edward McCarthy, is a property tycoon and facilitator. No one is sure of the meaning of facilitator; on the other hand it’s common knowledge that he’s an old-fashioned criminal whose empire has been built on profiteering and laundered money. Edward has rules; he made them himself but he keeps them inflexibly unaware that, since he started his ambiguous career, along with a tectonic shift in society, the world of crime has slipped a gear. Bankers he had never trusted so it was no new experience to find himself shafted by them at every turn; he can deal with bankers, he has his own financiers. His problem now is a new type of criminal: one with no vulnerable family members to be abducted and held hostage, a foreign despot: barbaric, alien, a man with suicidal henchmen and the internet at his disposal, most significantly an autocrat who recognises no rules at all.  This is a dirty war and the face-off in the Russian steam room is so fraught you wilt in the heat.

I reviewed Robotham’s The Secrets She Keeps nine years ago and thought it a tour de force. That was a psychological thriller and The White Crow is a different kettle of fish: a rampant romp where characters reveal themselves in dialogue: points of view in different voices, the action linked by a disingenuous commentary from Phil, while embellished by such as the enchanting five year-old Daisy, and Daragh, the McCarthy heavy, with his contempt for low life and joyful ignorance of syntax. Everyone speaks in their own voice, speech tuned to the speaker: cop, fireman, and family, with accents from Sloane Square to Brick Lane and beyond.

The research is impeccable, the plot simple: a kind of Good versus Evil, building to a fiery shoot-out on Bonfire Night. There was more murder on the way and no doubt more to come because Philomena is a series character. In his nicely balanced Acknowledgements the author, in paying tribute to his wife, confesses that in the year he took to write The White Crow, he shared her with another woman. And who can not be engaged by a girl who can talk to small children, has a black belt in karate and who can kill a villain with a kick?