THE DEAD SIT ROUND IN A RING By DAVID LAWRENCE
A BOOK REVIEW BY ALEX GRANT.

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PENGUIN BOOKS / Soft Covers @ $ 11.99 CAN. / March 2003.

This first crime-suspense novel by an established poet and scriptwriter from Britain, David Lawrence, is remorseless and completely plausible, depicting gangland London with unflinching brutality. The protagonist DS Stella Mooney is a tireless pursuer of justice haunted by nightmares about a lost child and a woman who takes to the trenches of police work with startling stamina. Mooney, who relies upon psychiatric counseling, is a careworn child of poverty-ridden slums who knows intimately that world of utter drudgery and constant sordidness. She relives it in her mind non-stop.Her specialized knowledge of the dregs of society brings her up against the Tanners, sadistic purveyors of flesh who enslave women from Eastern Europe as hookers, and who are menaced by no less vicious crooks from the former Bosnia-Serbia, a crucible and cauldron for stone-cold killers and hard-core assassins of the worst kind.

This appalling clash of cultures, with rape-victim refugees as the center-piece of the well-paced drama, is captured by writer Lawrence with consistent sensitivity and an affectionate ear for the everyday living that helps comfort the law enforcement personnel during their daily grind. Mooney is both helped and hindered in her quest to bring down the Tanners by investigative journalist and busybody John Delaney, who tempts her to abandon her one solid relationship with her lover George. There are matters she cannot bring herself to discuss with George and John helps her vent her demons, though she distrusts his profession deeply.

Stella’s inbred assertiveness and blind ,dogged belief in herself, time and again causes her grief, attacked by a pet ape, abducted by a mad-dog killer, she seems invincible: either the victim of a death-wish or a woman determined that no man can best her at her job. Yet she is entirely believable as characterized by author Lawrence - as are her kindly cohorts and her ferocious foes. All too believable much of the time since THE DEAD SIT ROUND IN A RING has that echoing ring of authenticity and benefits from the soul of a somber, serious writer who really does care, and who very closely observes the teeming tumultuous lives around him, particularly the low-lives caught in their cruel acts red-handed and incorrigibly so.

© Alex Grant April 2003
alexgrantreviews.@hotmail.com

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