Manchester Slingback by
Nicholas Blincoe
hbk out June 98
Published by Picador
Fifteen years ago, Manchester brought Jake Powell to his knees, stripped
him of his life as head honcho of the hustlers on the gay village and
reminded him of the lesson he'd learned in a childhood spent among the
nonconformist fundamentalists of the Pennines - nothing worth having ever
comes free.
Now the past is back to haunt him in the rumpled shape of Detective
Inspector Davey Green, a Manchester cop who makes Dirty Harry look fresh
from the dry cleaners. There's a body on the moors, an old friend of
Jake's. There are disturbing similarities with the fifteen year old murder
of Jake's best friend, the event that drove him into exile. And now Green
wants Jake back in the Village to stir things up.
The resulting collision of past and present produces a nail-biting
excursion into the dark night of the human soul. Equally graphic in its
descriptions of low life having a high time and of the violence that's
always lurking in the shadows, this is the novel that establishes Nicholas
Blincoe as a solid talent that's here to stay. Still intoxicated with
language, Blincoe has tamed his more surrealistic and outrageous impulses
and written a novel that crackles with energy, wit and insight.
If Martians landed tomorrow, this would tell them all they needed to know
about Manchester's underground culture. More than that, it would tell them
most of what they needed to know about human nature. This time out, Blincoe
plays a blinder.
(
Val McDermid
- Gold Dagger winner & creator of Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan & Tony Hill)
