Tangled Web UK Review March 2008
Damaged Goods by
June Hampson
hbk out March 08
Published by Orion
at £9.99
Locations for crime novels have gradually moved away from the traditional venues of London and Home Counties and now Glasgow, Edinburgh and Liverpool seem to have been joined by Portsmouth, several authors using that high crime-rate city for their stories.
June Hampson, who lives in Gosport, is one of them and this is her third novel, rough and tough tales of the ‘sixties, with echoes of Martina Cole and her ganglife. Daisy Lane is a local girl, but one who has been involved with the London gangs, including the Krays. Both her husband and her former lover having been murdered, but now she has taken up with South London gangster Roy Kemp, though she lives in Gosport with her small son. In this book, she is being stalked by a professional boxer,
Valentine Waite, who is obsessed with her and abducts her, holding her prisoner in a squalid room, ravishing her on a regular basis,
The book is mainly a recital of the efforts of her friends, who run ‘massage parlours’ in Gosport and also her gang contacts, to find and rescue her. The plot is complicated by the appearance of Angel, a stripper pal of Daisy’s, who makes a play for Roy Kemp – and a slightly bent local detective, who is sweet on Daisy.
The writing is powerful and gritty – and quite frankly, verging on the pornographic in places This is a thriller, not a ‘whodunit’ and I’m sure it will be a big seller.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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