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.
Spring 1941 and ex policeman Joseph Gunner is back on the mean streets of Glasgow with a war wound that won’t heal and a morphine monkey on his back. To add to his problems his old boss, Drummond, has persuaded him to investigate the discovery of the mutilated body of an escaped German POW in a bombed out-building. A case powerful forces are willing to go to any length to see brushed under the carpet.
This is a first-rate thriller from the author of the Harry McCoy novels that promises the start of an equally successful series. Drawing on real life events around the flight of Nazi leader Rudolf Hess to Britain to broker a peace deal Parks builds a story that piles on the thrills combined with convincing historical detail.
This is a depiction of wartime Britain from which the usual comforting myths are entirely absent. In their place is a world where the privations of war have created fresh opportunities for crime and the need to counter an existential threat has blurred already thin lines between right and wrong.
Gunner is a promising central character, a veteran scarred by his experience of combat and often ambivalent about what he is required to do as a ‘polis’. There is a wide scope for Parks to explore the compromises the need to serve his addiction, his bosses and his own awkward moral instincts force him to make.
Hopefully Joseph Gunner will ride, or limp, through the ruins of wartime Britain many more times. To the delight of a readership this first instalment is sure to build.
