Whew!! This was a dark one. Many, many topics covered throughout- corruption, drug use, seismic, racism, FGM - and that's all after the quite unsettling start when DI Diana Walker is called to the site of a Sheffield school in the middle of being demolished to make a grizzly discovery. There is a recently placed locked office cabinet. On finally getting it open it reveals its treasure - a mutilated human corpse. And from that point we are up and running.
It isn't always clear to the reader how all the different strands and plot threads are going to pull together or even if they will but somehow Nina manages it.
There is a strong sense of family and African heritage running through the story too and I found that gave me an added sense of curiosity and an urge tonfind out more which is something I always enjoy.
I was lucky enough to get to meet the author this past week at a signing event in Waterstones, Sheffield where she was interviewed by fellow author Russ Thomas.
One thing she asked me, that I thought I'd bring up here was "How Sheffield was it?". I can safely say she caught the flavour of my home city extremely well. The language too was spot on (Nina is a linguist among other things). The dialect you speak can often be difficult to read or write down because, I guess, you end up wanting to write or see the words as you expect them to be, not as you speak them (example, if someone comes in from outside you may say to them "shut door" but the temptation would be to write it as "shut the door" or "shut t'door". We tend not to use "the" in Sheffield but instead use a more glottal noise). Anyway, Nina writes the conversation pieces as we would speak them here which certainly worked for me.
For a first novel this was a good read, I'm excited to see what comes next (and having listened to Nina talking about her life I'm REALLY hoping there will be an autobiography some day!)
It took me a couple of attempts to get going with this book (thats more about me than the quality of the writing though) but once it got going there was no backing out, I had to know what was going to happen next.
4/5* A solid debut.
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