Russell James has been named “the Godfather of Noir” by Ian Rankin. Russell writes crime novels - about criminals and victims, not the cozy procedural or whodunnit. He is the editor of Great British Fictional Detectives.
When a very left-wing author sets his dystopian novel in London a few years hence, who do you think will be his villains? Not, surely, the police and politicians? John Fullerton has seen the real-life world in all its awfulness. An ex-Reuters man, reporting back from Beirut and the Middle East, he has never succumbed to the soft seduction of London’s easy money. Far from it. In his latest book he aims an Exocet at our new world.
It is 2022, and under a strongly right-wing government capital punishment is back. On Parliament Square a guillotine has been erected, for if capital punishment is to be a true deterrent the public needs to see it carried out. And heads must roll.
Is anyone fighting back? Of course they are. Rogue cop DI Kramer (they don’t come more rogue than Kramer) is using a murder investigation to plunge into the darkness beyond the point of no return. His side-kick DS Nicole Arden knows her boss has gone far astray. She ought, at the least, to report him. But she has more loyalty to this ugly unlovable man than to an irredeemably corrupt police force. What should she do? What will she do?
This is the first book in the Kramer series, and Arden may need several books to find how far she herself is willing to go in pursuit. Who should she pursue, and to what end?
