Review of Down Among the Dead Men by Ed Chatterton (2013, Arrow Books)

Writer Dean Quinner has finally got his wish and The Tunnels, his first movie, has started to shoot in his home city of Liverpool, with Ben Noone, a charismatic Californian, in the lead role.  Working on the shoot is Terry Peters and his nephew, Nicky.  Not long after filming has started Nicky’s parents, suburban dentists, are murdered and the teenager has disappeared.  DCI Frank Keane of Merseyside’s Major Incident Team is assigned the case.  Newly promoted, recently separated and involved in a messy affair with a colleague, Keane is ready to stir things up, but his boss wants a softly, softly approach given the value of the movie industry to Liverpool, the celebrity status of one of the movie’s investors, and the interest of the media.  Still getting used to office politics in the upper echelons of the force and not known for his softly approach to cases, when another body linked to the film is discovered Keane continues to blunder on certain he has the perpetrator in his sights despite the lack of evidence and warnings to drop his line of enquiry.

Down Amongst the Dead Men is a book of two halves.  The first half is set in Liverpool and is a very good, straightforward police procedural.  Chatterton immerses the reader in the world of DCI Frank Keane, DS Em Harris and their colleagues and sets up an intriguing puzzle involving the death of two dentists and the disappearance of their son, who was working on a movie shoot.  The characterization and social interactions are nicely portrayed and the story is riveting and compelling with a nice blend of personal tribulations, police politics, and difficult investigation.  The second half shifts the action to Los Angeles and becomes much more thriller-like in its style, with Keane operating at the edge or outside of the procedures that gave him power but boxed him in in Liverpool.  The plot links Keane up with Menno Koopman, his former boss who also made an appearance in the first book, who has flown in from Australia to help with the investigation.  Whilst this part of the book is gripping, culminating in a tense finale, it is also less believable in substance given its political turn and presence of a shadowy organisation and I just didn’t buy the ending.  If Chatterton had found a way of wrapping up the story in Liverpool this would have been a five star read for me.  Nevertheless, it was engaging and entertaining read despite the shift in location and style and I’m very much looking forward to the next DCI Keane case. 

Review of A Dark Place to Die by Ed Chatterton (Arrow, 2012)

When Stevie White returns to Liverpool, the city where he was born shortly before his mother emigrated to Australia, he never expected to be tied to a scaffold pole, tortured and burned alive on Crosby beach, a new addition to Antony Gormley’s art work ‘Another Place’.  DI Frank Keane is first to the scene, quickly joined by the ambitious DI Emily Harris.  Somewhat awkward collaborators, they both sense the murder is the work of one of the city’s notorious drugs gangs but have little evidence to go on.  As they slowly try to solve the case on the other side of the world Keane’s former boss, Menno Koopman, is enjoying retirement with his partner, Zoe, running a coffee business on Australia’s east coast.  He has no desire to return to Liverpool, but Stevie is Koopman’s son, the product of a teenage fling and he feels compelled to travel back and seek justice.  Keane is conflicted between helping his former boss and keeping him at arm’s length, but Koopman’s presence in the city has started a chain-reaction he can’t control both there and in Australia.

A Dark Place to Die has four standout strengths.  First, the characterization is excellent, with even the minor characters having a well-defined persona.  Second, there is a vivid sense of place both with respect to Liverpool and the various locations in Australia.  Third, Chatterton provides realistic and compelling contextualisation with respect to the drug gangs and trade in both locales.  Fourth, the story is for the most part nicely plotted and well paced, managing to keep two parallel but intertwined plotlines unfolding in sync throughout the book.  As a result, even though the tale is complex and layered it is straightforward to follow.  There is some graphic violence in the telling, but it is necessary to the story.  Despite the positives, the story does start to unravel a little toward the end, with at least one too many plot twists for my liking (in a tale full of twists).  Nevertheless, A Dark Place to Die is a strong start to a new series.  As a final aside: I have no idea why the cover shows a dungeon, or why the tag line is ‘no escape, no rescue, no mercy’; they totally fail to capture the essence of the book.  The Australian cover which uses a Gormley statue, with the tagline ‘killing the messenger was only the beginning’ is much more appropriate.