To Catch a Rabbit

Gun-running, drug-smuggling, people-trafficking – you might be forgiven for thinking that this is another run-of-the-mill, sleazy, tedious cops-and-robbers effort.  But it is far from that.

This is a novel, almost casually involved with crime. It gripped me from the first, and  I read it in one 5-hour enthralling session, with only a brief pause for tea. The descriptions of the setting, Yorkshire at its bleakest, the characters, were so subtly slipped in that I absorbed them subliminally.

A questing dog has sniffed out a dead girl in an abandoned refreshment van, and its young owners have dragged PCSO Sean Denton to see it. Sean is a very newly-recruited Police Community Support Officer, who is anxious to do things right. Having "called in" (police procedure is obviously well-researched) he is joined by the team led by DCI Barry "Burger" King, over-weight and full of himself. This the first strand of the narrative. There is an agency for helping   foreign visitors with immigration problems, where Karen Friedman works. Karen's brother Philip is missing, He works as a casual driver for Johnny McKenzie.   Two more strands. More characters: Lizzie Morrison, a "posh" PC: the Moyos, facing extradition, – but don't be put off, they are introduced casually and gradually.

Throughout the narrative there are odd chapters headed with times through Bonfire Night, the signification, of which I hope you will grasp more quickly than I did. For this reason, among others, I am now reading this excellent book again.