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yorugua1891's review against another edition
5.0
Wonderful!
After a very nice first book in the series Bruen truly hit it out of the park with this one. Brant and Roberts are back, and with them come several of the characters from the first book, including the band aid couple that killed a cop and fled to America. Falls is jumping back from the disappointments in her love life and becomes a more central character in this installment, which I really enjoyed, since she is one interesting gal.
As is usually the case with Bruen, the characters are blunt and in most cases have zero tolerance for nonsense. There are really no "good guys", and even the main characters are wretched in their own way. If you are looking for a typical police procedural, you would do yourself a favor looking elsewhere. In Bruen's books the cases usually are resolved by someone presenting the solution to the cops, or by pure chance, or by the perpetrators getting in trouble due to their idiocy. What we do get is a superb work on character development. It's been two books and I am totally hooked and want to know more about the main characters. Also, this noir besides having the raw violence, the disregard for law and order and the self-destruction by some of the players has a nice and healthy dose of dark humor. I found myself laughing out loud often while I was reading it.
I have to acknowledge, I truly like the way in which Bruen writes, so it will be pretty hard for me to write a work by him that I dislike. That being said, in this case I absolutely loved the book, here you can see what Bruen is all about. Many of these characteristics will appear later in some of his finest works on the Jack Taylor series, but here they were already polished and ready for prime time. Finally, the decision to take part of the plot to the US was brilliant, and the clash of cultures provided opportunities for many witty dialogues.
After a very nice first book in the series Bruen truly hit it out of the park with this one. Brant and Roberts are back, and with them come several of the characters from the first book, including the band aid couple that killed a cop and fled to America. Falls is jumping back from the disappointments in her love life and becomes a more central character in this installment, which I really enjoyed, since she is one interesting gal.
As is usually the case with Bruen, the characters are blunt and in most cases have zero tolerance for nonsense. There are really no "good guys", and even the main characters are wretched in their own way. If you are looking for a typical police procedural, you would do yourself a favor looking elsewhere. In Bruen's books the cases usually are resolved by someone presenting the solution to the cops, or by pure chance, or by the perpetrators getting in trouble due to their idiocy. What we do get is a superb work on character development. It's been two books and I am totally hooked and want to know more about the main characters. Also, this noir besides having the raw violence, the disregard for law and order and the self-destruction by some of the players has a nice and healthy dose of dark humor. I found myself laughing out loud often while I was reading it.
I have to acknowledge, I truly like the way in which Bruen writes, so it will be pretty hard for me to write a work by him that I dislike. That being said, in this case I absolutely loved the book, here you can see what Bruen is all about. Many of these characteristics will appear later in some of his finest works on the Jack Taylor series, but here they were already polished and ready for prime time. Finally, the decision to take part of the plot to the US was brilliant, and the clash of cultures provided opportunities for many witty dialogues.
rosseroo's review
4.0
This slim book picks up a few months after the events of A White Arrest. Southeast London's DI Roberts has been diagnosed with skin cancer while his domestic situation is on life support, DS Brant is more or less recovered from a knifing, and WPC Falls is unexpectedly preggers. Meanwhile, the druggie homeless couple that killed a cop and knifed Brant have fled to the US, the local gangster lord is getting a little peeved with Brant's enthusiasm, a local psycho/hitman called Alien is back on the streets and looking for his ex-wife, and there's a serial arsonist at large. As before, the characters are outsized, the action quite violent, and the dialogue ratatat. Throw all these in a blender of staccato 1 to 3-page chapters, and the result is another Bruen's unique pulps.
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