Shortlisted for the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger 2009.
Judges’ comments: ‘Bad Catholics centres on the almost schizophrenic morality of a Catholic ex cop, Jimmy Costello, who returns to his former patch where he works at a shelter for the homeless. When one of the workers there is murdered, he investigates the crime. He is as ruthless and vicious as the hard men and yet has a strong sense of justice as he goes about atoning for his past.
Minor characters like Sister Philomena and Mr Amhurst add a very moving element to the tale as well as a pure integrity which inspires Costello to help them.’
Meet Jimmy Costello. Quiet, respectable, God-fearing family man? Or thuggish street-fighter with a past full of dark secrets? Perhaps the answer is somewhere in between …
Meet Jimmy Costello. Quiet, respectable, God-fearing family man? Or thuggish street-fighter with a past full of dark secrets? Perhaps the answer is somewhere in between …
After Jimmy's wife dies the conflict inside him is too much and the violent assault he commits on a gangster forces him to leave London and his job with the police and disappear for a while. Now he's back, on what you might call a divine mission … and to settle a few old scores too.
Through the eyes of his hard-boiled ex-cop, James Green takes us on a thrilling journey from 1960s Kilburn, through war-torn 1970s Africa to the modern streets of a London that seems to have cleaned up its act … until you scratch the surface.
From Bible commentaries to the world’s first and only collection of beer poetry, James Green has been writing full-time since 1997. After leaving school when he was 16, Green became a miner for about a year. It scared the living daylights out of him and he vowed to never again do anything so dangerous or dirty. He spent the next 30 years with his wife Pat raising their three children and being ‘the most ordinary people in the world’. Green’s life took a turn for the extraordinary when he quit teaching, moved to Northumberland, and took up writing ‘to keep the wolf from the door’.
