Mark Timlin is a British author best known for his series of novels featuring Nick Sharman, a former Metropolitan Police officer who takes up the profession of private investigator in South London. He is also a renowned book reviewer and literary commentator. His most recent work is REAP THE WHIRLWIND. In his early years he did various jobs including work as a member of the road crew for THE WHO, including working backstage at Woodstock in the 1960s on the lighting cranes
More info > http://wwwshotsmagcouk.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-return-of-nick-sharman.html
Way out in the Texas boondocks under the boiling summer heat, a big-rig driver named Wyatt Branson finds a thirteen-year-old girl with only one green eye lying by the side of a rural route. Abandoned. Like trash. Just her luck it was this individual who found her. But was it good or bad luck? Whichever, he takes her home, and en route he christens her Angel.
Odette Tucker, a small-town cop from a line of small-town cops, one leg flesh, one leg metal, heads for Wyatt’s ranch house when a responsible citizen sees the girl in his truck, and calls it in. You see, both Wyatt’s one-eyed father (missing body parts are a constant in this novel)and his sister, Trumanell, vanished one day, and folks believe Wyatt is guilty of murder and worse. And Odette let him fuck her up against his truck in the car park of a local bar the previous night. There’s a lot of history there, going back to high school. Even so, it’s not the coolest act for a number of reasons, including the fact that her husband is waiting at home in bed.
As a side-line, and in the memory of Trumanell, Odette and her cousin Maggie run an underground railway for vulnerable girls, and Angel joins their ranks, after being fitted with a prosthetic eye, co-incidentally by a specialist with only one eye too. (Told you about the body parts. Heaberlin seems obsessed.)
Just be told, like all small towns in crime fiction, it hides a thousand secrets, a thousand skeletons, just like it should.
Then, halfway through the novel the years fly by and the narrative voice changes and all bets are off.
Anyway, That’s enough plot for now. Just take my advice and read this book. It bursts from the traps from the first page. Superb style, great characters and story. I’ve got to say I loved it. If it were jazz it would be Charlie Parker, hard bop. If it was a takeout, it would be Wagamama bang-bang cauliflower. If it was a country song it would be ‘Hello Stranger’ by Johnny Cash.
What more can I say?
It really is that good.
