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THE BEST CRIME NOVEL OF 2024 – THE TIMES
‘I very much doubt I’ll read a better crime novel this year’ IAN RANKIN
‘Quite breathtaking’ DAILY MAIL
‘Dominic Nolan is a wonderful writer’ CHRIS WHITAKER
‘Mind-blowing…so much more than a crime novel. An amazing piece of work’ SARAH PINBOROUGH
It’s 1952, and London is victorious but broken, a city of war ruins and rationing, run by gangsters and black-market spivs.
An elaborate midnight heist, the biggest robbery in British history, sends newspapers into a frenzy. Politicians are furious, the police red-faced. They have suspicions but no leads. Hunches but no proof.
For two families, it is more than just a sensational headline, as their fathers fail to return home on the day of the robbery.
Young Addie Rowe, daughter of a missing Jamaican postman and drunk ex-club hostess mother, struggles to care for her little sister in a dilapidated Brixton rooming house.
Claire Martin, increasingly resentful of roads not taken, strives to make the rent and keep her teenage son Ray from falling under unsavoury influences in Notting Dale.
She finds herself caught between the interests of dangerous men who may know the truth behind her husband’s disappearance: Dave Lander, whose reserved nature she finds difficult to reconcile with his reputation as a violent gang enforcer, and Teddy ‘Mother’ Nunn, a sociopathic, evangelising outlaw and top lieutenant in Billy Hill’s underworld.
Drawn together through the years in the city’s invisible web of crime and poverty, the fates of the broken families and violent men collide in 1958, as the West Indian community of Notting Hill’s slums come under attack from thugs and Teddy Boys. For Addie, Claire, Dave and Mother, old scores will be settled and new dreams chased in the crucible of London’s violent summer.
‘Incredibly good… one of the most interesting, brilliant crime writers around’ JANE CASEY
‘What a triumph. What an absolutely magnificent achievement. Transporting, startling, and ultimately almost overwhelmingly powerful’ A.J. FINN
‘An extraordinary piece of work. The writing is beautiful and the world is entirely realistic in its brutality and moments of transcendence, reminiscent of Patrick Hamilton’s work and also Brighton Rock. A brilliant book’ HARRIET TYCE
Praise for Dominic Nolan:
‘Brings the obsessional dread of James Ellroy to 1940s London’ IAN RANKIN
‘Extraordinary…a career-defining performance’ THE SUNDAY TIMES, CRIME BOOKS OF THE YEAR
‘Crime writing of the highest quality’ DAILY MAIL
