Last Rights by
Barbara Nadel
hbk out June 05
Published by Headline
at £18.99
Barbara Nadel is already well-known for her series about Turkish
Detective Cetin Ikmen - excellent stories, even if the names of the
characters are so hard to pronounce, even mentally.
It is hard to imagine a more distant change of tempo in this book, as Last
Rights concerns an undertaker, no less, set in the days of the 1940 blitz in
the East End of London.
The book is hailed as the first of a series and I am intrigued to see how
this seedy character can be embroiled in a series of crimes, from his
position as a rather drab funeral director in West Ham. Of course,
undertakers deal with corpses, so that's a good start!
The lead character, Francis Hancock, was 'shell-shocked' in the trenches
during the Fist Great war and when the bombing starts, he cannot stay
indoors, but has to run around the neigbourhood to escape his nightmares.
On one such fugue, he comes across a man screaming that he has been
stabbed, but Francis runs away and is afterwards plagued by conscience,
especially when the chap is brought dead to his funeral parlour.
The rest of the story is about his search for the truth, which puts him up
against violent gangs, who are willing to see him off.
An unusual and gripping story, not least for the horrific portrayal of the
relentless bombing that inflicted such hardship on the population of East
London over sixty years ago.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
Last Rights by
Barbara Nadel
