What You Don't Know is the second in David Belbin's Bone & Cane crime series; the first book appeared in 2011 and topped the Kindle charts a couple of times, so there should be a good deal of interest in what Sarah Bone and Nick Cane get up to next.
As with the previous volume, Sarah and Nick don't fit the standard profile of a typical crime-fighting duo. They are former lovers, whose lives have sharply diverged since their younger days. Sarah is now a junior prisons minister in Tony Blair's newly elected government, while Nick is struggling to rebuild his life after a five-year prison sentence for drug dealing. Much as she might like to rekindle their old friendship, Sarah's ministerial position means that she must maintain a careful distance from Nick, for fear of being tainted by association. However, she is able to use her influence to set him up in a new role, working for a drugs advisory project in their home town of Nottingham.
Although the couple rarely meet face-to-face, the continuing connection between them allows Belbin to tell a story which spans all levels of society, from the highest positions of power to the lowest rungs of existence. Although the story is framed as a murder mystery, it also works as a detailed examination of the effect that illegal drugs have on our society, as told from a wide range of perspectives. Hard-core addicts, so-called "casual" users, small-time dealers, big-time distributors, support workers, law enforcers, policy makers: all have their role to play in this tale, which in some ways does for Nottingham what The Wire did for Baltimore. (Except in this case, the story's foundations are rooted in factual reality, namely a corruption scandal which rocked the city in the late Nineties.)
It's a slower-paced affair than its predecessor, with a plot that steadily chips away at the central mystery, while allowing separate but interlinked storylines to unfold. Once again, the characters don't conform to good-guy/bad-guy stereotypes - not least Bone and Cane themselves, whose actions are often far from heroic - but Belbin has a knack for laying bare the reasoning behind their frequently flawed decisions, without ever casting judgement.
The storylines eventually converge into a climax which is genuinely shocking - all the more so, given Belbin's refusal to provide the reader with a reliable moral compass. But although different readers will draw differently weighted conclusions, few will be left in a better position to argue that this country's "war on drugs" has ever been fought effectively.
