Customer Reviews

The Dead Sit Round in a Ring (Ds Stella Mooney, 1 X)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

What a fine debut novel! Lawrence's plotting is dark, textured, and laced with tales of the seedy underworld of London's crime scene. This first book in a (hopefully!) series starring Stella Mooney is well thought out and consistently gripping--the end is believable without being predictable.

If you like British police procedurals, like Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, Mo Hayder, and Denise Mina, then this will be an author to add to your list of fun authors to watch.

Here comes a likable female detective sergeant named Stella Mooney. Stella is an amazingly durable lady when you consider the mental and physical pummeling she takes during the course of the story.

First of all she finds four people sitting cozily in a circle in an apartment living room. Problem is that they are all dead. Three of the victims are cult suicide victims, but the fourth has a just slightly detectable stab wound to the heart, something that smacks of the work of a professional assassin. Stella's search for the killer takes her into the London underworld, and a mafia type family that the word evil really doesn't begin to describe.
In one scene one of the brothers arrives at a warehouse in a limousine to whack someone who is skimming from the business. He trots in complaining that it is too hot and humid for this sort of thing, shoots the guy in the head, and walks out still complaining about the weather.

It's a grim world of drugs and prostitution, and Stella cruises through it, getting beaten up periodically even when she is minding her own business. It isn't enough that she gets slugged by humans, she also has a turn with a jungle animal that leaves her quite shaken. Stella doesn't need these sorts of troubles as she is also seeing a shrink for the nightmares she is having about one of her previous cases. And in her love life she is torn between two decent guys.

People get whacked, and Stella continues her precarious chase for the murderer. People from Eastern Europe get involved, and matters get darker. Stella drinks a bit too much, but, hey, what would you do if you had her problems? Author Lawrence is also a poet, and he injects many a clever phrase into the narrative. A second book about Stella is out, but to date is only sold in England. American readers should note that British jargon is kept to a minimum. Just remember that "nick" is a police station or jail, and "shebeen" is an unlicensed liquor bar.

The title comes from the opening scene of this outstanding debut - three elderly family members sitting in a circle, dead. Suicides. And one extra man. Not suicide.

London Detective Stella Mooney sorts out the bizarre scene soon enough, but finding the killer of the extra man, small time crook and purveyor of grisly "murderabilia," Jimmy Stone, leads her into the shadowy underworld of sex slavery and criminal turf wars.

A persistent and attractive journalist who seems to know more about the case than he should complicates Stella's murky personal life as he draws her into the bleak and dangerous corners of London inhabited by Eastern European girls forced into hopeless lives of prostitution.

Point of view shifts periodically among various secondary characters from cops and doomed petty criminals to George, Stella's live-in lover, and Ivo Peric, a vicious Serbian assassin (and Jimmy Stone's killer though we don't yet know why) growing bored waiting for his assignment. Each scene's focus is intense and local, and the panorama of views gives the reader a full and complex picture of the crime, the politics and the people.

The prose is spare and pointed and often poetic, the characters expertly fleshed and flawed, the pace sharply punctuated. A gritty procedural, sure to be enjoyed by fans of Ian Rankin and any who enjoy urban noir.

In London, Detective Sergeant Stella Mooney leads the inquiries into the macabre deaths of four people sitting in a ring. Three of them are ruled suicides, but the other is a homicide that looks like a professional technician committed the crime. The victim Jimmy Stone was an amoral wastrel with the reputation of selling his soul for cash as he ran a web store peddling memorabilia from crimes and items owned by renowned killers.

The investigation leads Stella and her squad to a notorious crime family that treats their prostitutes with scorn peddling the flesh of forlorn fraught females from the residue of the deadly hot spots of the former Soviet Union. Still what could have a stone cold seller like Jimmy offered for sale that upset the Tanners so that they most likely killed a fellow dealer? Interfering with her work on finding proof is nightmares involving murdered children from a case she failed to solve and her own miscarriage and her shaky relationship with her lover, frustrated with Stella's inability to share with him what haunts her.

THE DEAD SIT ROUND IN A RING is an extremely dark police procedural that is quite exciting and realistic, but very different from the typical London cop tale. The story line is more urban noir and even the heroine has an intense gloomy outlook that combined with her obsessive compulsive behavior serves her well as she learns (along with shocked readers) the atrocities in Serbia have come with the young female victims and continue in London. This is a terrific tale, but needs a label not to read if suffering from depression.

Harriet Klausner

I, honestly didn't know what to expect. Standard police procedural, quirky British cozy or else... What I didn't expect was such a dark and gritty, violent but deeply poetic gem of a novel. The world we live in, or in this case, London, is a disturbing, filthy place, according to Mr. Lawrence. There are realy no good guys, just different shades of gray, gooey gunk. The horrors that people inflict upon other people are at times hard to bear, but nevertheless unavoidable in this book. This might not be an easy novel to read, but it is certainly one of the most important mysteries of the early 21.century.

I got the first novel in the Stella Mooney series from the library. Now, all of the UK police terms are making sense!

In The Dead Sit Round in a Ring, the police find four people dead in a flat, three are related and suicides and the fourth, well, that is the problem. That fourth person, Jimmy Stone, has a punctured heart from a steel needle. Yes, Jimmy was murdered. Thus begins a mystery that takes Stella Mooney and her team into the underworld of London, where people trade in drugs, guns, and women. During the course of the investigation, the team comes up against some very powerful gangsters and a link to the war in Bosnia.

The writing and dialog are tight and gritty. Stella is an excellent heroine, a woman, as I have said before, that has some baggage. And while she is the center of the novel, she has her fair share of beatings and close calls with death. She is single minded in finding the killer of Jimmy and that gets her in trouble with some of her peers.

Like the other novel I read, Lawrence doesn't end the book cleanly. That is, not all loose ends are tied up, just like real life (or an episode of "Law and Order"). I think that is part of what makes these novels so good - sometimes the bad guys do get away. One thing that happens in the novel, I couldn't tell if it were a random act of violence or a premeditated attempted murder. There are a few episodes like that and I think that it lends a measure of realism to Lawrence's writing.

If you are interested in the Stella Mooney books, I highly recommend starting with this one. It prepares you for the others, laying the groundwork for Stella and her relationships and providing good explanations of policing in the UK. An excellent novel.

Lawrence is an exciting new noir author. He writes a fresh, very real female protagonist, who takes all the knocks usually reserved for male characters. If you like Ian Rankin, try this author.

I generally like the tough, gritty, can-handle-anything character, particularly a female. But Stella is so unrelentingly dark as to be oppressive. Thankfully, she is in therapy, which offers the only hope of my continuing the series because I read first for character. The book is well written but, without a single spark of light, I did not enjoy this book as much as I might have done.

This book is not badly written. But the content is so depressing and the incidents so vile that it makes for a miserable read. There is no relief, no oppotunirty to recover from one grim episode before lurching into the next.

It is the school of gritty realism. Psychopaths rule London's Underworld. The dysfunctional "hero" - D.S. Stella Mooney, is not sympathetic. Nobody is. This collection of characters are enough to make a person lose their faith in human nature.

I do not like giving up on a book but finally lost my patience just over half way through. The incident between Steve Tanner and DS Mooney in the pub finished me off. It offended me beyond my endurance. The final straw. And the book went in the trash.

I wish I had not bought this book. I hated it. And I don't recommend it.