A Dark Redemption (Carrigan & Miller Police 1) [Paperback]

This is a classy, stylish and troubling thriller from a writer who has over the course of his two previous novels proven he knows how to balance page-turning appeal, great writing and thought-provoking ideas. Before it was Amsterdam, then Greece; now Sherez turns his attention to his home town of London and comes up trumps again - for residents there are the familiar little places and moments that don't make it often enough into novels, and our daily paths are recast with those things from the dark end of the street that we might more happily turn away from. It's a tale, amongst other things, about the experience in the capital of African immigrants, refugees of small wars most of us hardly know about, young men trained to kill in places of heat and light and then set adrift, futureless, in an alien culture: "an unseen army living their lives under the radar, a shadow London of hospital cleaners, dishwashers and street sweepers. A city he passed every day yet never noticed. Invisible because they wanted to be, invisible because we preferred them to be so."

Detectives Carrigan and Miller hunt the murderer of a young Ugandan student through this squalid and sodden city (it's mostly raining, the best its inhabitants can hope for a break enough in the downpour to light another cigarette) while coming to terms with the low-key chaos of their own lives. The first in a series, we learn that Geneva Miller is the daughter of an émigré mother and going through a bitter divorce; Jack Carrigan is rather mysteriously widowed and haunted by decisions made on a post-Uni trip to Africa that left one of his best friends dead. Cautious at first, cast against each other by their commanding officer, slowly they begin to understand each other's silences and wounds in a way that bodes well for the novels to follow. Both their careers are heading in the wrong direction, and as much as anything the book is about reaching a certain point in life - a certain fatal distance from the halcyon days as an undergraduate - and realising that finally your options are much fewer, that some choices you've made really do count forever. There's a sadness to the core of the book, a loneliness, that gives this story a real charge: behind the twists and turns and surprising revelations, there is a sense that something really is at stake here, beyond the desire of the detectives just to solve the case.

With just the right balance between the classic and the modern - the currents of London's lost rivers and the data streams of Facebook and Twitter flow together perfectly here - the author has set a high benchmark for the next book in the series. I'm looking forward to it already.

So, I started reading a novel that sounded like a regular police procedural about a murdered student in London and ended up reading about Northern Ugandan politics and warfare, Joseph Kony and child soldiers too.
A Dark Redemption is an excellent, thoroughly well written, crime thriller. The main cop protagonists, DI Carrigan and DS Miller, are very well rounded and complex characters whose back-stories are fed to us sparingly, droplet by droplet. This, together with a fast paced complex plot, made A Dark Redemption a novel which I found very hard to put down.
It is also a novel about how decisions in the past can return to haunt us in the present. I very much enjoyed reading this novel.

What I liked most about this novel was the strong sense of place, whether in Africa, or in England. It worked well on building up a sense of tension - something nasty was going to happen to the three carefree young men in Africa - and by stretching out the tension and leaving the reader hanging, my interest was maintained. The fear of being in a foreign country when things go out of control, nobody knows where you are, and anything can happen was well conveyed - taking the wrong path in life can literally be life changing.

It's a novel with a dark undertone of lives unfulfilled, of opportunities missed, of time passing, what might have been as we sit in death's waiting room - a sadness, which was reflected in the lives of all the characters and mirrored in the weather and gloomy grimy parts of London that many people never see.

Not an optimistic novel, but a good fast read - and I certainly didn't see the twist in the end coming.