Longlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2010.
A gangland thriller with heart. A veteran East End criminal is murdered and a Russian flees. All very nice but the twists make this intelligent tale sometimes very different. It centres around a crime reporter and contains a wonderful pub quiz and all sorts of red herrings. A gently paced intelligent read, an endearing style and lots of humour and amusing dialogue make for a fun read. I enjoyed his first too, The Paradise Trail.
A brilliant novel about contemporary London gangland crime by the hugely well reviewed author of THE PARADISE TRAIL. Britain's best known gangster, Charlie Hook, wants to tell his life story and chooses crime reporter Laurie Lane as his reluctant ghost. But the next day Hook is dead, his blood and hair on the walls of his north London mansion.
Who has killed the last of the London Godfathers? Could it be a Russian businessman with a love of Scottish poetry and something dodgy in his Hampstead garden?
Duncan Campbell is a senior correspondent with the Guardian, where he has worked as the paper's crime correspondent and Los Angeles correspondent. He has written five non-fiction books. He has previously worked for Time Out and contributed to OZ, IT and The Rising Nepal. He is married to Oscar-winning actress Julie Christie.