Spider Trap: A Brock and Kolla Mystery (Brock and Kolla Mysteries) (Hardcover)

by Barry Maitland (Author)
Key Phrases: tyre yard, railway land, Michael Grant, Cockpit Lane, Brown Bread (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
This gripping and complex ninth installment of Maitland's Brock and Kolla series (after 2006's No Trace) ties past and present in London's West Indian community. After the bodies of two young girls are found in South London, both shot through the head, media attention precipitates a Scotland Yard investigation. A schoolboy exploring a deserted Brixton rail yard uncovers three unidentified bodies shot with the same gun some 24 years before, at a time of civil unrest and riots. Det. Sgt. Kathy Kolla investigates the girls' murders, while DCI David Brock feels compelled to follow the slim leads to the past as the investigation widens to include an agent from Special Branch and aging ex-con Spider Roach. Some of Spider's family and associates have risen to wealth and prominence, and Brock's queries run up against a suspicious number of walls. Though character development is somewhat lacking, the intricate plot, spot-on dialogue and vivid descriptions will keep readers turning the pages. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
The British crime-solving team of Detective Chief Inspector David Brock and Detective Sergeant Kathy Kolla returns. During a murder investigation, human bones are uncovered that date back 20 years and appear to be connected with the infamous 1985 riots that swept the south London area of Brixton. While trying to find out to whom the bones belong, Brock and Kolla run up against an old nemesis, Spider Roach, and their investigation gets a whole lot more complicated—and dangerous. Fans of the Brock and Kolla series will enjoy the usual banter and procedural-style investigation with overtones of something darker. The series shows no signs of slowing down. Pitt, David

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur (October 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312369085
• ISBN-13: 978-0312369088
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #521,629 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "The past is over. You can't put it all to rights.", October 28, 2007

By	E. Bukowsky "booklover10" (NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Here is a familiar idea for a novel: One or more long-buried bodies are suddenly uncovered. An investigation ensues, and old secrets are gradually revealed that will change people's lives forever. Peter Robinson, Val McDermid, and other popular writers have used this story line for years with great success. In "Spider Trap," Barry Maitland, a Scottish-born writer who lives in Australia, takes this generic, all-purpose premise and uses it to create a compelling tale of how the past and the present often converge with explosive results.

Detective Chief Inspector David Brock and Detective Sergeant Kathy Kolla of Scotland Yard are superbly drawn protagonists who are caught up in an ugly situation that becomes ever more horrifying as time goes by. First, two sixteen-year-old girls, Dana and Dee-Ann, are found beaten and shot through the head in a place called Cockpit Lane. The press assumes that the West Indian girls, who were well-known thieves, carjackers, and addicts, may have run afoul of some unforgiving Jamaican drug dealers. Next, a schoolboy poking around in a rail yard comes across a human jawbone. After further excavation, the police uncover the remains of three men who were tortured and executed at this site over twenty years ago. Senior Investigating Officer DCI Brock, along with Kolla, Detective Inspector Bren Gurney, forensic pathologist Dr. Sundeep Mehta, and others, team up to discover the men's identities and try to find the person or persons who killed them. Shockingly, the policemen later discover that there is a connection between the two homicide cases, even though they occurred decades apart.

As Brock tracks down witnesses, he comes across a name that makes his blood run cold: Spider Roach, "one of the most vicious and most successful crooks in South London." Spider, who is now in his seventies and ailing, was involved in fraud, arson, extortion, drug-dealing, and murder over his long criminal career. He was a ruthless predator who intimidated terrified witness and threatened to kill their families if they testified against him. His strong-arm tactics enabled him and his three malevolent sons, Mark, Ivor, and Ricky, to stay out of jail, much to Brock's chagrin. Brock ruefully tells Kathy, "Spider Roach was my big failure, Kathy." Nowadays, the Roaches own legitimate businesses and appear to have gone straight. Have they truly reformed or are they hiding their nefarious activities behind a veil of legitimacy?

Barry Maitland has created a vivid cast of characters who play out their respective dramas against the backdrop of a violent and racially-charged landscape. Brock is a lonely man who is estranged from the woman he loves, and he buries himself in his work to escape his solitary existence. Kathy has not had a meaningful relationship in years and she is on her guard when Detective Inspector Tom Reeves, an undercover cop from Special Branch, reenters her life, claiming that he wants to reconnect with her. Reeves helps Brock and Kolla gather evidence that may at long last place Spider Roach and his evil family behind bars. Teddy Vexx is a cocky hoodlum who has killed more than once with impunity; his clever and slimy lawyer finds loopholes that enable his client to remain free. Michael Grant is a Member of Parliament who was born in Jamaica in abject poverty and worked his way up to earn a prestigious position in London politics. He is an activist who goads the police to clean up London's slums and put a stop to the "evil alliance of poverty, drugs, guns, and criminal business interests operating in the district." Winnie Wellington and Abigail Lavender are two kindly women who have welcomed Jamaican boys into their homes, trying to steer them on the right path with the help of compassionate local priest, Father Maguire. As the ever more complicated events unfold, Grant, the Roach family, and the detectives are headed for an inevitable confrontation. Startling revelations and violent deaths punctuate this suspenseful and richly textured novel, which has a shocking and unsettling conclusion that proves just how elusive the truth can be.

Maitland is not content merely to write an engrossing mystery, although he has certainly done that. He creates a richly detailed picture of socially and economically disadvantaged black immigrants being preyed upon by an entrenched white criminal syndicate; of power-hungry politicians stabbing one another in the back to achieve their dubious aims; of men who abuse their wives and rely on a code of silence to keep their activities hidden; and of people whose skeletons emerge from their closets at the most inopportune times.

Laying a trap for Spider and his clan may cost the detectives their careers, their reputations, and even their lives. It is to Brock's and Kolla's credit that they are willing to risk so much and work so hard to see that justice is finally done. This is a riveting, intricate, and textured psychological thriller that demonstrates how the choices that we make help determine the paths that our lives ultimately take, for good or ill. "Spider Trap" is beautifully written, skillfully constructed, and highly recommended for fans of literate British police procedurals.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars entertaining Kolla-Brock police procedural, October 13, 2007

By	Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews (#1 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In the West Indian section of South London, someone assassinates gangland style two young girls. Both shot in the head, the vicious killing shakes up the city as the media goes on a feeding frenzy with the image of the deaths of innocence.

The brass of New Scotland Yard knows the homicides require they provide a major investigation not so much to solve the insidious killings and bring their predator to justice, but more politically needed to quiet the noisy press and to calm upset citizens. Adding to the chaotic fears, a schoolboy finds the remains of three corpses in an abandoned Brixton rail yard; they have been dead for almost a quarter of a century. Ballistics affirms that the gun used then is the same weapon that recently was used to kill the girls. Detective Sargent. Kathy Kolla investigates the present day murders while Detective Chief Inspector David Brock works on the twenty-four years old homicides.

Although the suspects (yesterday and today) seem as lifeless as the corpses, the latest Kolla-Brock police procedural is an entertaining whodunit. The dual investigations are fun to follow as they share a murder weapon but seemingly little else. Fans will enjoy the inquiries made by the two cops whose separate investigations begin to intertwine.

Harriet Klausner

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "The trouble is, it's all just too long ago, and the evidence to connect him just isn't out there anymore.", December 30, 2007

By	Michael Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Taking place a few months after Barry Maitland's previous book, No Trace, Spider Trap covers similar territory, taking place in the chilly environs of inner London. In this story much of the action is centered in the alleyways and backyards of the Cockpit Lane and its lively and colourful street market where the City's poor immigrant West Indian community have come to live and work.

It is also here that DCI David Brock and DS Kathy Kolla of Scotland Yard's Serious Crimes Branch at Queen Anne's Gate are called upon to investigate the brutal murder of two young girls, fataly shot in the back of the head for seemingly no apparent reason. But what is even more sinister, is the discovery by a young and nurdish school boy Adam Nightingale of the skeletons of three young adult black males, executed in the same horrific way, all in their twenties and all lying perhaps for years in the same area.

As Brock and Kolla gather there team together, the clues begin to unravel and the investigation twists and shifts to arrive at the answer that Brock already seems to know applies both to the City and to himself. The answers to the case remain hidden in the events of 1981 when Brock was just a rookie during the Brixton race riots where the arrest of a black man led hundred of youths to go on a rampage throughout the streets of Brixton in south London, hurling petrol bombs at police, burning cars and looting shops in an outbreak of violence that lasted all night.

DI Bren Gurney arrvies to take charge of both crime scenes while at the same time as Detective Inspector Tom Reeves is loaned out from Special Branch to help Brock and Kolla gather the necessary evidence, his valuable skills as an undercover cop seen as an essential ingredient in cracking the case. From the first it becomes pretty clear that like the two girls, at least two of the boys were shot in the head, but the problem is that there is no one has any idea who they were and there are no missing persons that seem to fit the profile.

Soon enough everyone is realizing that something equally terrible had happened that cool April night back in 1981 and nobody had known, and the idea that these bodies had been waiting all this time for someone to find them and uncover their story gets to Kathy and Tom and even to Brock. Tom seems to think that the murders of the three black boys are perhaps reminsicent of a "Yardie" killing, West Indian gangs who immigrated to the Uk in the early 80's bringing their guns and their cocaine, and also their old rivalries, the groups ending up more lethal to each other than to anybody else.

While Brock traces back the events that lead to the Brixton riots in an effort to solve the murders, progess is being made by Kathy and Tom in unravelling who may have been behind the killings of the two girls. When traces of semen are found in one of the girl's mouths, it looks as though the case is solved, especially when they get a DNA match to local bad boy, Teddy Vexx. All they need is some forensic evidence to put Vexx in the building with the girls.

Brock is sure that Vexx and another local criminal Jay Cocker could be a possibility. Vexx is the current big shot of the neighborhood, a part owner of the local Jamaica Omnibus Club, he has long been suspected of selling drugs, recyling stolen cars, and maybe even running a crack laboratory from his other businesses. There is however, a far more sinister suspect who suddenly appears on the horizon in the form of Edward "Spider" Roach, once a powerful underworld figure and a baleful influence on many lives, his gang once holding a fierce iron grip on this part of London.

But now Roach is a changed man, a respectable businessman, and a great giver of charity, rarely seen in public except as a regular church goer. He's also known to be a generous doner to a variety of charitable and political organisations including the Catholic Church and the Conservative Party. Which begs the question: What is the link, if any, between these multiple murders in Cockpit Lane, committed twenty-four years apart?

Also, what part does local member of parliament Michael Grant play in all this? His office in Cockpit Lane helps Kathy track down the identity of the victims, and he's also a crusader against drugs and crime on his community. Grant is convinced the Roaches are still operating in partnership with local black gangs, but is he holding something back and not being totally honest with Brock?

Is Spider Roach somehow connected after all this time, returning to his same old haunts and repeating his actions in almost the same place? But how could wealthy and respectable man be physically involved in the murder of two kids? Suddenly the mystery intensifies and Brock, Kathy, and Tom find themselves caught up in both murder inquiries that approach a sort of turning point, the evidence beginning to swing their random searches into more deliberate directions.

Brock frantically searches for the meaning behind the phrase "brown bread;" it's what Adam Nightingale was looking for on the railway land when he found the bodies of the boys. Meanwhile, Cathy tries to unravel the mystery behind the sudden attack on Adonia the wife of Ivor Roach, Spider's second son. Cathy is certain that Adonia'a daughter Magdalen is holding something back about the murders as she stays sequested away intheir gated community of The Glebe, like a "fortified village trying to pretend it's just an ordinary bit of posh suburbia."

Author Barry Maitland delves deep into the rarified inner London world of guns, drugs, and oral rapists as he builds a subtle kind of suspense that gradually moves back in time as Brock and Kathy work to solve the two murder mysteries. This is a world where cops are in real danger of being blindsided by the machinations of a powerful family that have spent years using obstructive tactics by the best lawyers money can buy, along with intimidation of witnesses, fabricated alibis, and somehow obtaining inside information on police moves.

The middle-aged and rather tetchy Brock is certainly at his most vulnerable here as he tries to repair the damage with Suzanne, the love of his life, and he's certainly less open with Kathy about his feelings for Cockpit Lane, and is even somewhat startled by the intensity of the memories it evokes, these powerful feelings he'd long ago thought were locked up tight.

The author's foreshadowing of a violent act provides the climax to the story and it is indeed shocking as Maitland peels away the layers of duplicity of organised crime which now masqerades as apparently legitimate British businesses. In the end, Spider Trap delves deep into the dark underworld of this area of London, exploring long buried memories and the settling of old scores, along with portraying the fracturing of a community and the dramatic revelations of the powerless and vulnerable when they're ultimately faced with death. Mike Leonard December 07.