'Strong on city life and the interplay between policemen and local politics' Independent
Wednesday 5 January is a black day in the police calendar of dockland Canton and its Art Deco resort of Ocean Beach. It dawns in freezing mist and icy roads. It ends with a vanload of drugs hijacked, two policemen dead, and gunfire on the motorway. DCI Sam Hoskins and his sergeant, Jack Chance, are meanwhile embroiled in a fruitless investigation of Billy Catte, seaside arcade proprietor and club-owner.
In a political storm that pits zealous social workers against municipal gangsters, as well as police against revenge and kidnap, Hoskins holds the tenuous thread on which several lives depend ...
Donald Thomas is the author of seven biographies, including Cardigan of Balaclava and his best-selling life of Cochrane: Britannia's Sea Wolf. He is also a respected novelist, and has won the Gregory Award for his poems Points of Contact. He was born in Somerset, educated at Queen's College, Taunton and Balliol College, Oxford. He holds a personal chair at the University of Cardiff.