Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
London in the hard winter of 1941, the capital of a country fighting for survival and a city where the strains of wartime create a perfect environment for crime.
Two deaths in the battered city, one that of a film star; the other that of an unknown young woman found on a bomb site, provide challenging cases for DCI Merlin and his team. Both killings involve secrets that the holders, some with connections to people in high places, will do anything to keep hidden.
This latest novel in Mark Ellis's DCI Merlin series presents a version of the home front during WW2 that goes way beyond the familiar clichés. Behind the heroism and the stiff upper lips is. society on the edge where all the social norms are being stretched to the limit. An environment that brings out the hero in some people; and the villain in others
The plot is satisfyingly complex with film folk with shady pasts mingling with small time crooks who have made it big thanks to the war. There is a strong hint of the cinema of the period with menace and mayhem being played out in rooms filled with a permanent fog of cigarette smoke
Ellis mixes into this cameos and name checks from major figures from the forties including Winston Churchill and self-proclaimed most evil man in Britain Alister Crowley. This adds an extra touch of authenticity to a book that has clearly been well researched, but wears its authors learning lightly
This is one of the best, coming alive with the vivid depictions of Britain at war. But the authenticity within a thriller - to borrow a golfing idiom from that era – a top hole.
