The Twilight Time [Audiobook] [Audio CD]

The greatest attraction of all three of Karen Campbell's novels is how closely they portray the working and private lives of police officers in Glasgow. There's nothing remotely glamorous about the story here, just as there isn't in real life, because as anyone working at the blunt end of law enforcement will tell you, crime is invariably dirty, seedy and repellent with none of the exotic characters or staged crime scenes common in contemporary fiction. So if you want to break away from the endless stream of trophy-taking serial-killer 'thrillers' and want to peep into the world of policing as it really is with utterly convincing and authentic characters, take a look at The Twilight Time and its sequels. It's a cut above the mainstream and a welcome escape from the detritus we are usually offered in the crime genre these days.

Despite the occasionally dark tone of the imagery, there are frequent touches of humour, often as a result of the reader actually getting to know and care for the characters for once. One of Karen Campbell's strengths is her notable ability to create individual and different personalities; in this debut novel the two leads are female but they are very different people with almost nothing in common apart from the man that one of them is married to and for whom the other has lustful desires. The primary lead is DS Anna Cameron, a thirty-something single woman with no hang-ups about a sexually predatory lifestyle that in fiction tends more often to be attached to male characters, despite the fact that she has to face the male-dominated politics of a police force that has clear (if understated) prejudices towards female officers. It's equally clear that women like Anna Cameron need a thick skin to survive, not just out on the uncompromising streets of Glasgow but also within the corridors of power at her own station and beyond. The other female lead is an ex-cop called Catherine Worth who left the force to raise a family, and her own psychological pressures of post-natal depression (coupled with her husband Jamie's reaction to it) are sensitively and sometimes uncomfortably drawn. Within all this is a story that could easily be taken from real-life events, so nothing glamourous - just a nasty violent murder of an elderly man and a series of assaults on a few prostitutes - but it only acts as a conduit for the real story that is a few weeks in the life of two women who either work for or who are married to the police force. Very much a character piece with highly effective imagery and (I believe) welcome use of local dialects within the dialogue.

This is an excellent novel, and the great news is that Karen gets better and better as she develops because the two follow-ups After the Fire and Shadowplay make for even more riveting reading. This lady can really tell a story - she's so under-rated and deserves a much wider audience. Recommended.

The book has been lumped into the crime-genre, mainly because the main characters are on the police (or married to someone in the police), and of course there are crimes to be solved.

And, as a crime-novel, it is superbly-written, with enough twists and turns in the plot to keep you intrigued to the end.

But this is a book is so much more than a run-of-the mill crime novel. It is every bit as much about the tedium of domesticity and the politics of the workplace as it is a crime novel. It is a every bit an alternative travelogue of Glasgow as it is a crime novel. It has characters that are so multi-dimensional that one moment you will admire them and the you will pity or even despise them.

I understand that the author has signed an initial deal for 2 books and that the second has already been written. I can't wait....

I'm a slow reader, but this was pacy, sharp and believable, and I couldn't put it down. The characters were well drawn, warts and all, the relationships were realistically complex, and the plot was fast and neat, with a clever and satisfying climax.