David Harsent

This first crime-suspense novel by an established poet and scriptwriter from Britain, David Lawrence, is remorseless and completely plausible, depicting gangland London with unflinching brutality. The protagonist DS Stella Mooney is a tireless pursuer of justice haunted by nightmares about a lost child and a woman who takes to the trenches of police work with startling stamina. Mooney, who relies upon psychiatric counseling, is a careworn child of poverty-ridden slums who knows intimately show more that world of utter drudgery and constant sordidness. She relives it in her mind non-stop.Her specialized knowledge of the dregs of society brings her up against the Tanners, sadistic purveyors of flesh who enslave women from Eastern Europe as hookers, and who are menaced by no less vicious crooks from the former Bosnia-Serbia, a crucible and cauldron for stone-cold killers and hard-core assassins of the worst kind.
This appalling clash of cultures, with rape-victim refugees as the center-piece of the well-paced drama, is captured by writer Lawrence with consistent sensitivity and an affectionate ear for the everyday living that helps comfort the law enforcement personnel during their daily grind. Mooney is both helped and hindered in her quest to bring down the Tanners by investigative journalist and busybody John Delaney, who tempts her to abandon her one solid relationship with her lover George. There are matters she cannot bring herself to discuss with George and John helps her vent her demons, though she distrusts his profession deeply.
Stella’s inbred assertiveness and blind ,dogged belief in herself, time and again causes her grief, attacked by a pet ape, abducted by a mad-dog killer, she seems invincible: either the victim of a death-wish or a woman determined that no man can best her at her job. Yet she is entirely believable as characterized by author Lawrence - as are her kindly cohorts and her ferocious foes. All too believable much of the time since THE DEAD SIT ROUND IN A RING has that echoing ring of authenticity and benefits from the soul of a somber, serious writer who really does care, and who very closely observes the teeming tumultuous lives around him, particularly the low-lives caught in their cruel acts red-handed and incorrigibly so. show less

It is nearly Christmas but there is precious little to be happy about in and around the grim Harefield Estate in West London. The weather has turned icily cold and everyone seems to be in a hurry. The book opens with the discovery of the body of a young woman in the park. She has been hit a hammer and then garrotted. As if this was not all awful enough, this victim is merely the latest in a run of similar murders across West London, and the police have next to nothing to go on.

The case is show more being worked by AMIP (the Area Murder Investigation Pool), and the leading officer on the front line is Stella Mooney. She grew up on the Harefield Estate but somehow managed to escape to university and then on into the police force. Stella, like every fictional cop (and probably a lot of real ones) has a whole raft of personal problems of her own, though Lawrence portrays these far more credibly than so many other novelists.

All at once there is a big break in the case. A man contacts the police to confess. This is not unknown - people contact AMIP all the time with fake confessions. This time, however, the confessor, Robert Kimber, seems to know things that suggest he had been at the scene. He in arrested and detained for as long as the law allows without him being charged, but the police are unable to verify his story, and he is eventually released. Shortly thereafter another, similar murder occurs, and Kimber disappears.

Lawrence's particular gift in these novels (this is the third in the series) is the way he captures the horror of the crime-ridden estate. There is a basic acceptance of the most feral approach to life. Everything is on offer on the Harefield Estate. There are brothels, shebeens, gambling dens, stores of illegal arms and, everywhere, people making, selling and taking drugs. He doesn't glamorise any of it - indeed, he goes out of his way to make it sound dreadful.

The plot is very well developed and utterly (even frighteningly) plausible, and Stella Mooney is a marvellous creation show less

It is nearly Christmas but there is precious little to be happy about in and around the grim Harefield Estate in West London. The weather has turned icily cold and everyone seems to be in a hurry. The book opens with the discovery of the body of a young woman in the park. She has been hit a hammer and then garrotted. As if this was not all awful enough, this victim is merely the latest in a run of similar murders across West London, and the police have next to nothing to go on.

The case is show more being worked by AMIP (the Area Murder Investigation Pool), and the leading officer on the front line is Stella Mooney. She grew up on the Harefield Estate but somehow managed to escape to university and then on into the police force. Stella, like every fictional cop (and probably a lot of real ones) has a whole raft of personal problems of her own, though Lawrence portrays these far more credibly than so many other novelists.

All at once there is a big break in the case. A man contacts the police to confess. This is not unknown - people contact AMIP all the time with fake confessions. This time, however, the confessor, Robert Kimber, seems to know things that suggest he had been at the scene. He in arrested and detained for as long as the law allows without him being charged, but the police are unable to verify his story, and he is eventually released. Shortly thereafter another, similar murder occurs, and Kimber disappears.

Lawrence's particular gift in these novels (this is the third in the series) is the way he captures the horror of the crime-ridden estate. There is a basic acceptance of the most feral approach to life. Everything is on offer on the Harefield Estate. There are brothels, shebeens, gambling dens, stores of illegal arms and, everywhere, people making, selling and taking drugs. He doesn't glamorise any of it - indeed, he goes out of his way to make it sound dreadful.

The plot is very well developed and utterly (even frighteningly) plausible, and Stella Mooney is a marvellous creation show less

David Lawrence's first novel is set in the Harefield Estate, a lawless hinterland, within easy walking distance of the millionaires' playground of Holland Park, where every other flat seems to be a shebeen, brothel or crack factory. The Harefield really is a concrete jungle, and the police officers who have to cope with its fallout have to demonstrate a particular toughness themselves.

One of the toughest of these officers is Detective Sergeant Stella Mooney. She actually grew up on the show more Harefield, with a mother who spent most of her time seeking refuge in whatever drugs she could find while her father had decamped in her infancy. Somehow Stella escaped, as one of just three people from her school to get to university, but, having joined the police as a reaction to her upbringing, she now finds herself back on the fringe of the Harefield Estate.

Of course, as seems obligatory with fictional detectives nowadays, Stella has to contend with her own emotional baggage. Rather a cliché, of course, but in this instance Lawrence handles it marvellously. Stella's personal trauma is intense and awful, yet also utterly plausible, as are the measures she takes to counter it. I think she is a brilliantly-crafted and readily believable character.

The novel opens with the discovery of four dead bodies in a flat near the Harefield. Three of the corpses would appear to have been poisoned while the fourth has been stabbed with unusual precision and lack of fuss. Further investigation shows that the three people who were poisoned were siblings and members of an unorthodox religious group, while the man who was stabbed turns out to be Jimmy Stone, a minor criminal with a record for general hooliganism, with a particular taste for football- and race-related violence. He also seemed to be doing brisk business selling 'murderabilia' (items related to renowned murders).

As Stella delves into the victims' backgrounds she finds more and more evidence that Jimmy Stone had been involved with the Tanner family, local gangland bigwigs who run most of the guns, drugs and prostitution that abound on the Harefield. AMIP's biggest concern is that the murder of Jimmy Stone might merely be the opening shot that leads to an all out gang war as newcomers strive to oust the Tanners and take over their patch.

Lawrence writes with a spare, almost journalistic style, pared back and never over-indulgent. Violent events happen in the book but they are never laboured over, gratuitously. The plot is multi-faceted but develops very steadily and plausibly. While the conclusion comes as a surprise, all of the threads have been carefully arranged, and there are no loose ends.

Gruesome but compelling/ show less