Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hot Nights in Leicester, 19 Aug 2003
This novel is so much more than the gritty urban thriller the cover suggests. It IS pacy and unputdownable from the first terrific riot scene. There are plenty of shocks and twists as several police investigations mesh together. But it is also the story of a place - Leicester - now set to become the first city in the country with a majority ethnic population. As such, it is very much a novel of its time. Our heroine, Mo Akanbai, typifies this ethnic mix but she is always her own person. Compassionate, impatient, sometimes confused - in the end she has what it takes to face her worst nightmares. Her dry sense of humour is often a much needed antidote to the novel's darker moments. The writing moves easily from the intimacy of Mo's own fractured relationships to the immediacy of these social concerns. Riots, race crimes, asylum seekers, police corruption, politicians' manoeuvring - all these figure in a deftly woven narrative. For a Leicester reader, the city landscape was particularly vivid. Some fine descriptive writing brings this to life just as the distinctive voices of its characters enliven the dialogue - from a Muslim factory owner to a skinhead fanatic to a Serbian refugee child. Having raced to get to the final paragraph, it was great to discover the author is promising two more linked novels set in the same time and place - a steamy August night in Leicester. If this is Rod Duncan's first novel, it bodes well for the next two.
|
|
|
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
For once the blurb's right!, 18 Sep 2003
By A Customer
"He's a little angel who tried to throw a lump of concrete at a fire engine," acknowledges Inspector Mo Akanbai faced with Roddy Whelan's class mates at school assembly after rioting the night before in Waterfields, Leicester. Mo's internal race-awareness course had been subject to budget cut-backs. If it hadn't two beat officers wouldn't have arrested two Sikh youths carrying their blades and her painstaking, bridge-building community relations work wouldn't be up in smoke. Mo is one of a crowd who run into a mosque on hearing a scream, failing to remove her shoes and cover her hair first, and encounters a woman, "draped in black - the full chador. Black cloth covering everything but her hands and a narrow strip above her veil. So all I can say about her is this: her eyes are wide with shock or fear and her hands are red with blood.". The police's failure to quickly deal with corpse breeds resentment and a second riot. Mo is seen as a liability when one of her community contacts makes a formal complaint and is subsequently murdered, she finds herself followed by a plain-clothes police officer - as if she is the murder suspect - and her ex-lover warns her to get out of the city. It's only a chief constable's support which prevents her being suspended. "The only thing I know is this man had a knife to my throat and he didn't use it. Not even when he had an open mineshaft to dump my body in," Mo's mysterious potential attacker gives her information she can use but can she trust him? Not even the chief constable can save her from a second threat of suspension when she's framed for the murder of a colleague: her ex-lover. Mo is arrested, handcuffed and left in the back of a police car as a third riot errupts, knowing there's a bomb in a back of the van parked in front and that no one will believe her.The single detective working against enemies within and without may seem clichéd, but "Backlash" isn't just about Mo and Rod Duncan's characters are so three dimensional and memorable that, as they weave in and out of subplots, you've been reeled in, hook, line and sinker. "Backlash" broadens out to ask wider questions of our society and multiculturalism without taking sides and appreciating answers are rarely straightforward. Racism isn't just white on black or British-born versus immigrant but a term often used to cover more deep-seated problems. In short "Backlash" is a confidently written compulsive thriller with real characters that makes you think long after the last page. For once, the blurb is right, "sheer page-turning compulsion". Highly recommended.
|
|
|
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Made for TV, 21 Aug 2003
By A Customer
I’m always wary of books with ‘messy’ covers that are clearly meant to instil something of the grit and drama I’m expected to find within, but Rod Duncan’s Backlash did, for once, satisfy his publisher’s bravado, delivering a credible and highly-engaging novel that lives unsettlingly in the memory long after completion.From the opening pages, it’s clear that the author has a good grasp for the mood of racial tension that carries the plot forward. The grisly discovery of a corpse in a Muslim temple haunts the text throughout. The subsequent investigation, by a female mixed-race community police officer, is far-reaching and disturbing, on both a political and emotional level. Perhaps the most disquieting element of this carefully written and well-researched book is the feeling that it sits just beneath the surface of everyday palpability. The riot scenes, particularly those at the climax of the story, are acutely harrowing. As in all police procedurals, it’s easy to lose track of which officer is which at what rank and fidelity. But this is a minor criticism for a book peppered with a cast of strong, wide-ranging ethnic characters that all combine to bring the narrative to a bloody, stress-ridden heap. All that would show this book to better effect is the small screen. A worthy debut from a great new voice. Can only get better.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Rod Duncan
by Rod Duncan
by Stephen Booth
by Peter James
With an Amazon.co.uk Gift Certificate, you can get them what they want (even if you don't know what that is). 
Amazon Home