A new author to me and I’m really excited to see he has other books already published.
Why?
Because I’ve just read the best British crime thriller I’ve ever read.
Reading is subjective, and not everyone has the same tastes, but for me this book ticked every box, and ticked them in style
Predominantly set from the mid 1930s up till just after the Second World War the story mixes fact with fiction.
Real events, and real people populate the story alongside the fiction.
The fact, in the 1930’s somebody was killing prostitutes in the red light area of Soho. Several murders were attributed to Soho Strangler, a case that was never solved.
These murders form the skeleton for the story in this book. When the first woman is found the Clubs and Vice Unit, known by the locals as “The Dirties” start an investigation.
Lead by DS Leon Geats the team are more known for keeping the girls and their pimps in line, and controlling the gangs running competing clubs which provide drugs and girls.
Geats knows the streets and the people who inhabit them, a proper old school, skull banging policeman.
When senior officers decide to allow the notorious Flying Squad, with their maverick leader Nutty Sharpe, to take over the investigation it only leads to conflict amongst the police, whilst the murder investigation merely trundles along.
Geats is tasked to partner up with one of the flying squad, DS Mark Cassar. The unlikely partnership begin to link several murders, much to the annoyance of Sharpe who is convinced he has his man, but the murders continue.
The murdered women, mainly prostitutes, are factual, as is the leader of the Sweeney. The rest is a cleverly woven, semi factual, brilliant story telling.
The lives of Geats and Cessar are consumed by finding the real killer, with the story moving, at times into the 1960s before finishing, where it started in 2002.
I love stories set in the recent past, with real life settings, where the fiction is knitted into real events and includes real people.
British readers might be familiar with the excellent Charles Holborn series by Simon Michael, and international readers will know of James Ellroy and his books set in 1940s onwards America.
Dominic Nolan is right up there in that category.
The historical events in the book had me disappearing into Google for hours. The story of the Soho Strangler is fascinating and the way Nolan has written it took me right into the heart of 1930s Soho and the police investigation.
Some of the periphery character also prove to be real life people. The Mitford Sister were socialites associated with Oswald Mosley and his Black Shirt fascists. In fact Unity Mitford was umpired to be a lover of Adolf Hitler.
Another few hours spent on Google educated me about them, and what a story that is.
All of the things we hear on the news about London, and other big cities, today were happening in the 1930s Soho.
People trafficking with women being sold into the sex trade. The women having to pay off the debt of the traffickers being forced into prostitution.
To make sure the debt was never paid getting the girls into drugs, which they had to sell their body to purchase.
All of these we think of as today’s problem. But in the 1930s there was another layer.
Some of these women were foreign agents acting for the German military, trying to infiltrate British society, and get access to British troops, and ultimate their knowledge of how Britain was preparing for war.
This all forms part of the story and adds real intrigue.
Who is the murderer, but almost more importantly who are some of the victims, they certainly aren’t who they seem to be.
And if that’s the case, are they just random prostitution who happen to have met the wrong man, or are they women working undercover who have been specifically targeted.
And just to add to all of this, the killer is a pervert with a liking for incapacitating and flogging his victims.
My next few reads are already loaded on my Kindle and it’s no surprise that they are written by Dominic Nolan.
Pages: 610. Publisher: Headline. Audiobook length 14 hours 13 minutes. Narrator Owen Findlay
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