Billie Morgan by
Joolz Denby
pbk out November 03
(Serpent's Tail)
at £8.99
Billie Morgan tells her own story in a direct, personal voice. It is a story of hard-kept
secrets, of betrayals, and of peaks and troughs of happiness and despair. Despite Billie's
revelation on the very first page that she is a murderer, it is impossible not to sympathise
as she describes her awkward childhood and rebellious biker youth. Joolz Denby draws on
her own experience in a biker gang to produce an intriguing and unusual novel, raw with
violence yet a moving and involving experience for the reader.
Billie's own sad and bitter history unfolds gradually, and with it the complexities of her
relationships with her family and friends; the character portraits are brilliantly drawn -
strong characters all, yet no stereotypes here. The moral dilemmas which confront Billie
are overwhelming, but she emerges as a woman to admire and respect - a fictional
heroine worthy of the name. The murder she committed was not, in the circumstances, so
very dreadful, but the aftermath drives the rest of Billie's life and that of her beloved
godson Natty.
Bradford, Billie's home town and stamping ground, is a fashionable setting for crime
stories at the moment – Lesley Horton's DI Handford and Patricia Hall's DI Thackeray both
tackle gritty crime in its gritty streets (though in the case of the latter they are cunningly
disguised as Bradfield). But Joolz Denby's tale, set in the same Northern industrial city, is
at once darker and far more personal, with its atmospheric descriptions of the city and its
surroundings. This is a novel to read and re-read, and a worthy successor to "Stone Baby".
Billie Morgan by
Joolz Denby
