Published by Vintage
Detective Nick Belsey is broke. Now it looks like he’s out of a job – something happened last night, something with the boss’s wife…
At dawn, on what should be the last day of Belsey’s career, Hampstead CID is ghostly quiet. Belsey checks the overnight files. There’s a missing-person report. But this one’s different. It’s on the Bishops Avenue, London’s richest street. Belsey sees a scam, an escape route.
But he hasn’t got there first.
Furiously paced and thrillingly plotted, The Hollow Man is a black love letter to London’s shadow world. It marks the beginning of a seductive contemporary detective series, and the arrival of a future master of the genre.
Oliver Harris is appearing on the New Blood panel chaired by Val McDermid at this year’s Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival and so, ahead of that, I thought it was high time I read his much applauded debut novel.
A gritty London based tale of a cop who has gone off the rails, seeing a possible way out for his problems and getting himself deeper and deeper embroiled in the case he has dropped himself into. The Hollow Man introduces readers to an interesting and unique crime fiction cop in Detective Nick Belsey and a crime fiction author to watch out for.
With a plot that takes in everything from corruption, gangsters, gambling, missing persons, and of course a bit of murder thrown in too, The Hollow Man is a rewarding read.
It’s full of atmosphere and the darkness of the London we all know is around the corner from the one most us know, but Oliver Harris seems to know those darker shadowy corners very well indeed.
Bring on the second book and more of Nick Belsey please !
And you can get your copy of The Hollow Man here
Keith
A cracking short train-based read by author of Cuckoo and Every Vow You Break, Julia Crouch, created on her ‘Writer in Residence’ journey with East Coast from London to Harrogate.
The perfect read for your own trip to the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival which starts this Thursday. You can download it here for free. I couldn’t wait until Thursday’s train journey to read it – and, now I have, I am slightly nervous of discovering my seat might be opposite Julia’s on her way to Harrogate !
chaosdan
keithbwalters