Angel on the Inside by
Mike Ripley
hbk out March 03
Published by Constable Robinson
at £16.99
The twelfth of Mike Ripley's 'Angel' sagas, the unfailingly funny
crime series. The hero - or anti-hero - Roy Angel has quite a bit of
the author in him, being a part-time archaeologist, though in this
book there is no digging holes in the ground. Angel is perturbed to
discover that his rich, beautiful partner Amy has been married
before, a fact that she omitted to mention until the chap, Keith
Flowers comes out of jail, steals their car, abducts Amy and threatens
Angel with a gun. He responds by attacking his own BMW with a
JCB and things get progressively more complicated thereafter.
A lot of people suddenly become interested in Flowers, including the
police, a firm of female private eyes and two mobs of Welsh
gangsters.
Angel's ire is aroused when someone injures his killer-cat
Springsteen and his determined pursuit of the truth is as much to
revenge Puss as to clear up the business with Amy.
He gets taken for a ride by one lot of Welsh Mafia - not in a car, but
in a capsule of the London Eye, where he suffers some corporal
punishment. Then he has to visit a mysterious guy in a high security
prison, known as 'Mr Creosote' from his habit of decorating
opponents' lounges with the substance. The description of getting
into Belmarsh Prison is so detailed that the author must surely have
gone through this rigmarole himself.
The back end of the book takes place in Wales, where the answer to
this convoluted tale is to be found and Angel drives there in his old
London taxi, called Armstrong. The tired old gags which Englishmen
always wheel out about Wales are all there, about sheep-shagging,
endless rain, Jones the Fish and what-a-God-awful-place, but as a
Welsh reviewer I detected a grudging, but growing fondness for the
country as the book went on.
After an expensive night at Cardiff's best hotel paid for by the
'Tafia', which included a hot-and-cold running blonde, he drives to
Tregaron, which is in Indian country to the far west. Here we come
across the book's only corpse, though it's not a murder. Ripley uses
a lot of detail about his visit to Wales and most of it is spot-on,
except that he chooses to meet a top crook at a pub in the village of
St Nicholas, which in fact is about the only village in Glamorgan that
doesn't have one!
Compared to others that I have read and enjoyed in the series, Angel
on the Inside seems stronger on story than usual, as normally the plot
seems of secondary importance to the racy, chortling style. There
seemed to be fewer quips in this one, but still enough to make you
laugh out loud every few pages, a trait which seems to be confirmed
by the consensus of opinion amongst most reviewers of the series.
A cheerful, happy book, thankfully bereft of the grim-faced tearing
of hair and gnashing of teeth which accompanies the morbid serial
killings in the psychological thrillers which are churned out daily
these days. Not to be taken seriously, especially the gibes at Wales,
but a book to make you giggle and grin at frequent intervals.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
Angel on the Inside by
Mike Ripley
