Whitethroat
On sale
24th November 2022
Price: £10.99
Genre
The third book in the DI Nicholas Lowry series, for fans of Peter James and Stuart Macbride.
It’s November 1983 in Essex and there are reasons to be cheerful. Uptown Girl is sitting pretty at the top of the charts, Risky Business is raking it in at the box office, and there are now four channels on the telly. However, social tensions are beginning to bubble beneath the surface: Mrs Thatcher has embarked on her second controversial term, and the situation in Northern Ireland is ever-escalating.
Yet in the garrison town of Colchester, it’s another deadly standoff that is hogging the headlines. The body of a nineteen-year-old Lance Corporal has been discovered on the local High Street, the result of what appears to be a bizarre, chivalrous duel. It seems he was the victim of a doomed army love triangle. As such, the military police are wishing to keep the matter confined within military ranks.
This is all just fine, as far as Colchester CID is concerned. They have enough on their plate as is: with DI Nick Lowry in a tailspin following the breakdown of his marriage, WPC Jane Gabriel exasperated by the male-favoured system, Detective Daniel Kenton relying on substance abuse to quieten his demons from his last case; and their boss, DCS Sparks, shortly to become a first-time father at 55.
However, it is not long before the blood from the duel runs into civilian police affairs, and the trail presents CID with a local rogues’ gallery. A savvy entrepreneur. A wayward skinhead. A member of the landed gentry. And a shadowy Mauritian travel agent with a chilling reputation. Soon, they will discover, a real estate deal, a racist, and the town’s Robin Hood pub hold the key to the killing…
It’s November 1983 in Essex and there are reasons to be cheerful. Uptown Girl is sitting pretty at the top of the charts, Risky Business is raking it in at the box office, and there are now four channels on the telly. However, social tensions are beginning to bubble beneath the surface: Mrs Thatcher has embarked on her second controversial term, and the situation in Northern Ireland is ever-escalating.
Yet in the garrison town of Colchester, it’s another deadly standoff that is hogging the headlines. The body of a nineteen-year-old Lance Corporal has been discovered on the local High Street, the result of what appears to be a bizarre, chivalrous duel. It seems he was the victim of a doomed army love triangle. As such, the military police are wishing to keep the matter confined within military ranks.
This is all just fine, as far as Colchester CID is concerned. They have enough on their plate as is: with DI Nick Lowry in a tailspin following the breakdown of his marriage, WPC Jane Gabriel exasperated by the male-favoured system, Detective Daniel Kenton relying on substance abuse to quieten his demons from his last case; and their boss, DCS Sparks, shortly to become a first-time father at 55.
However, it is not long before the blood from the duel runs into civilian police affairs, and the trail presents CID with a local rogues’ gallery. A savvy entrepreneur. A wayward skinhead. A member of the landed gentry. And a shadowy Mauritian travel agent with a chilling reputation. Soon, they will discover, a real estate deal, a racist, and the town’s Robin Hood pub hold the key to the killing…
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Reviews
Whitethroat is an intricate picture of provincial Britain in the 80s - Thatcher, Northern Ireland, racial tensions, drugs, skinheads. It's also a portrait of Colchester - an army-run garrison town of feuding squaddies and their secrets. Policing all that, & digging up past crimes thought long forgotten, is an explosive mix
Whitethroat is bleak, downbeat and mesmerising; a subtle, compassionate and beautifully written novel that is something of an elegy to a way of policing - and living - that is gone for ever.
With a satisfyingly labyrinthine plot, Whitethroat is a story of males in crisis: young soldiers plagued by the memories of Derry firebombs; businessmen with scores to settle; police officers trying to self-medicate for work-induced trauma. Then there's Lowry himself, lonely and adrift after the breakup of his marriage. It's downbeat and beautifully written
Brilliant characters that ooze with all the excesses of the age
