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pipparature's review
5.0
Bright Shiny Things was quite a challenging read for me, in the current climate where my home city Manchester and London have both been the subject of terrorist attacks. The novel explores the melting pot of East London and the crimes investigated by PI duo Lee Arnold (an ex soldier who saw active service in the first Iraq war) and Mumtaz Hakin, his British born, Bengali heritage assistant. Into this mix comes an old friend from Arnold's days in Iraq who has a radicalised son who has left to join ISIS in Syria. Abbas believes his son wants to reach out and asks Arnold to help him do so.
Set against this family drama is the murder of a Brick Lane character which sets local police and families off in to a tangled web of young people on the verge of extremism and the adults who influence them.
The 320 pages of this novel are a tightly wound story which kept me reading until I'd finished the story. There is a large cast of characters but Nadel is able to interweave the plotlines into a compelling story. There is an effort to explain how easily young people become radicalised which was thought provoking. Add in a surprising twist at the end and I was left keen to find out what happens next to all of the main protagonists, and one of the antagonists. I hope to see more from Arnold and Hakin.
I received this book from a Goodreads giveaway.
Set against this family drama is the murder of a Brick Lane character which sets local police and families off in to a tangled web of young people on the verge of extremism and the adults who influence them.
The 320 pages of this novel are a tightly wound story which kept me reading until I'd finished the story. There is a large cast of characters but Nadel is able to interweave the plotlines into a compelling story. There is an effort to explain how easily young people become radicalised which was thought provoking. Add in a surprising twist at the end and I was left keen to find out what happens next to all of the main protagonists, and one of the antagonists. I hope to see more from Arnold and Hakin.
I received this book from a Goodreads giveaway.
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