An absolute stunner! One of The Times' Crime Books of the Year and no wonder. I was unfamiliar with Dominic Nolan but now I am mad keen to read his two earlier books Past Life and After Dark.
Vine Street has everything we could want in contemporary British noir - metropolitan vice, gangsters, dodgy coppers, serial sex murders - and a truly jaw-dropping plot twist about three-quarters of the way through. Vine Street spans seventy years, from 1935 to 2005, mostly concentrating on the Fascist ascendancy before WWII and the war itself. The lead characters are Leon Geats, a copper born to police the mean streets of Soho, his assistant Constable Billie Massie (female) and Mark Cassar, formerly of Vice, now risen to the Flying Squad and dreaming of greater things. The three of them come together over the death of a whore which leads to a crew of French gangsters. The trail runs cold but the bodies keep coming, into the Blitz and even after the war. It is in the mid-Sixties that they finally uncover a suspect and even then there are secrets to be kept.
Six hundred plus pages of tense narrative, beautiful prose, staggering plot. A work of pure genre genius.
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