The Unquiet Heart (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

With Gordon Ferris' s The Unquiet Heart, and I believe his earlier novel Truth Dare Kill, the reader is in the world of the private detective. The hero, Scotsman Danny McRae, is in the mould of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. He is a tough loner, driven to do good in a world generally evil. But together with a kind of cynical toughness he can also be romantic and idealistic.

McRae's background is London in the years just after the Second World War and his title of private detective is a somewhat superior one for the rather sleazy cases he generally gets employed to solve. The London (more accurately Bermondsey) that Ferris describes is a war-torn, gang-dominated community, whose inhabitants are often poor, lives controlled by ration-books, bomb craters and dust. A world of odd loyalties, a perfect 'noir' landscape.

The political and romantic dimensions reveal themselves in the female character of a crime reporter on a local paper, Eva Copeland, who first appears just to want McRae to let her in on some of his investigations so that she can report on them to her paper. In fact, when she disappears, it opens up a quite different can of worms. What she is actually involved in - McRae as well when he goes in search of her - is much more violent and frightening, associated in both cases with what happened to them during the war: he in a German prison camp in Dachau, she and her family as Jews under the Hitler regime. While he is prepared to forget the past and live his life in the present, she is looking to avenge the deaths of her family, lover and race and refuses to forget.

The action now moves to the world of post-war Berlin, where black-market goods, espionage, terrorism and cruelty flourish, innocent people suffer violent deaths and torture is a weapon. The city is divided into uneven quarters, Russian, German, English and American occupation, and it is not clear who is on whose side or who is spying on whom. Continue the story for yourselves, it makes an interesting read, disturbing in some of its conclusions but gripping in its power to hold.
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Posted on Behalf of Rosemary Brown
(whose is off-line at present)

Gordon Ferris has an extraordinary touch as a writer. In this his second Danny McRae book, he walks you through a war-tattered Europe through the eyes of Danny, a man whose brain has been equally ravaged. This powerfully-written piece draws you into the story and drives you on through scenes of mirk and darkness of the underworld of London and military chaos of Berlin as he pulls his life, and head, back together.
A real page-turner by an agile and accomplished author. I loved it. A fully-recommended read.

I found The Unquiet Heart by Gordon Ferris a gripping and entertaining read. I appreciated his short but resonating descriptions of contemporary events that conjured up memories of important moments during the immediate post World War 11 period in London and Berlin. Apart from the intriguing plot itself, his references to conditions in the two cities shortly after the WAR were convincing for readers who have experienced them first hand or read about them.

David McQuoid-Mason