The Girl with the Long Back: A Harpur & Iles Mystery (Harpur & Iles Mysteries, 20)

Harpur and Iles are back on the scene, and this time the danger is even closer to home.

With the rumored transfer of Chief of Police Mark Lane, London's competitive drug lords are on edge. In the past, Desmond Iles has managed to maintain the peace on the streets in an old-fashioned system of give a little, take a little. But with a dangerous mix of greed and fear, the looming threat of a stricter police force, and three sudden deaths, all sides are preparing themselves for a full-scale battle of the ugliest kind. A deliciously witty addition to a classic series, The Girl with the Long Back heightens the urgency and pace of the tantalizing London underworld in which cops and criminals, and all of their clever asides, are sketched in fantastic detail. Read more Continue reading Read less FROM PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Desmond Iles is in trouble, and that's enough to give a new jolt of energy to James's long-running series (Naked at the Window, etc.) about the dapper, devious, demented Assistant Chief Constable of an unnamed British Midlands city and his colleague and primary antagonist, Chief of Detectives Colin Harpur. Here Iles faces two challenges: a tough new chief constable may replace his well-meaning but clueless boss Chief Constable Mark Lane and crush Iles like a bug; and one of the city's three top drug magnates is rumored to want Iles dead. Harpur disapproves of his superior's style of policing, and despite Iles's distaste for using undercover agents (who have a bad habit of being killed) Harpur plants a sharp young female detective inside the smallest of the three drug operations. The titular young woman with the shapely rear is the 18-year-old daughter of a recently deceased "grass," or informer. Fascinated by teenage girls, Iles naturally finds himself attracted to he-until she begins to respond favorably to his advances. Once again, it's James's darkly ironic writing that makes this series worth the padding and occasional plodding: "It dismayed Harpur to think of [Iles] crushed and humbled, though God knew such a malevolent, pirouetting, egomaniac vandal half deserved it, or a quarter. Diminish Iles and you could undermine life's whole fragile scheme, as in the elimination of a species or act of genocide."
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The latest entry in the long-running police procedural series starring battling London cops Iles and Harpur is about as bleak and uncomfortable as a procedural can get, which is entirely in keeping with the way James' novels upend the conventional procedural theme of cops bringing order out of criminal chaos. In the Iles-Harpur books, the criminals have nothing on the cops when it comes to chaos and corruption. Assistant Chief Iles and his subordinate, Detective Chief Harpur, have worked for and against each other over the span of 20 books, their relationship as embittering as a bad marriage. This time out, Harpur sees Iles slipping, both politically and on the streets, as the uneasy peace Iles has crafted among the drug lords disintegrates into a full-scale turf war. Great information on the how-to's of undercover police work gives this novel its pulse, while the shifting points of view, from cop to drug lord, heighten tension. As gritty as it gets. Connie Fletcher
Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved REVIEW
James is one of the most original and talented voices among contemporary mystery writers. -- Booklist ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bill James has been called "the Elmore Leonard of Britain's underworld" (Kirkus Reviews) and has been named a "Master of Crime" in a mystery roundup by the London Sunday Times, which said, "There is nothing else quite like this series of police procedurals. James is concerned with the dilemmas and difficulties of policing Britain's inner cities, and he addresses these in hard-edged narratives that leave readers gasping and flinching, praying the people in these stories never come to live in their streets." In addition to the Harpur and Iles series, James is the author of other mystery series and a book on Anthony Powell. He lives in Wales. Read more Continue reading Read less