Cold Killers

This is the fifth in the Carter and Willis series and our story opens at the funeral of Eddie Butcher, one of four East End brothers who have more form than a stable yard full of race horses.

The remaining brothers, Harold the enforcer, Laurence, the youngest and Tony, are under house arrest in Eddie’s villa in Marbella; and are up to something. Judging from the way Eddie died, it’s got something to do with a large amount of ‘Charlie’ [aka Cocaine] and a line to the Columbian drug cartels. DI Dan Carter and DS Ebony Willis aim to find out who killed Eddie, who appeared to have ‘gone legit’- and also to uncover just what the rest of family [including matriarch Sandra], are up to.

Matters are complicated by a Spanish lawyer who goes missing, an NCA operative who might have gone rogue, corrupt Spanish cops and the need to collect three hundred million in diamonds to pay for the last consignment of drugs, before the Columbian’s start handing out ‘necktie’s’ all round.

With brother Tony teetering on the edge of a full-blown psychotic episode, surrounded by his memorabilia from ‘The Godfather’, snorting coke and descending into paranoia, you could almost change his surname from Butcher to Montana and you’d not be far off the mark. His connection to the cartels, Marco Zapata an equally venal smear of humanity, eggs him on and it’s only a matter of time before this human Molotov cocktail explodes.

Carter and Willis need to solve the murder and find out how the drugs are being brought into the U.K. and the clock is ticking