From Publishers Weekly
Hip, violent and funny vignettes of the mean streets of southeast London tie together this rowdy set of short novels by Bruen (The Guards), a modern Irish master of the hard-boiled. Collecting A White Arrest (1998), Taming the Alien (1999) and The McDead (2000) for first U.S. publication, this omnibus showcases the investigations of the aging Chief Inspector Roberts and the brutish Detective Sergeant Brant, with the assistance of the unlucky-in-love Woman Police Constable Falls. They don't always solve their assigned crimes, but know perfectly well if they can nail the occasional major criminal-"the white arrest"-they'll be able to keep their jobs. Among numerous subplots, they pursue a serial killer stalking England's winning soccer team, a vigilante gang hanging drug dealers and a hit man known as "The Alien" because he whacked a victim engrossed in the video of that movie with a baseball bat just as the monster pops out of John Hurt's chest. But quieter moments, such as Brant's visit to his home county in Ireland, are just as interesting. Bruen's relentless media references (to pop songs, noir movies, other crime novels, even H.P. Lovecraft and Jack Kerouac) may drive some readers to distraction, and his loose, ironic endings no doubt are too postmodern for traditional tastes. This is fun reading, though, for readers seeking something fresh.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Bringing together three short novels first published in Britain--
A White Arrest (1998),
Taming the Alien (1999), and
The McDead (2000)--this paperback finds the past-hard-boiled Bruen unleashing a chaos of cops and robbers in southeast London. While chasing killers with generic names such as "the Umpire" and "the Alien," Chief Inspector Roberts and Detective Sergeant Brant dream of a "White Arrest" that will salvage their faltering careers; black WPC (Woman Police Constable) Falls looks for love and her place in the white, macho police force. Brief trips to America by Brant and the Alien provide Bruen with some comic fodder as his hard-as-nails Brits mock the Yanks for their lumbering obviousness and goodwill. The Morse-code delivery, the casually horrific violence, and the completely corrupt milieu prompt easy but not completely accurate references to Bruen as an Irish Ellroy. Ellroy's stories have grand structures and hidden moral centers, while Bruen's take sometimes frustrating left turns with no clear rationale. This stuff smokes like cordite, but it blows a hole in your stomach instead of filling your belly.
Keir GraffCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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