CUT AND SHUT – Jonathan Peace

CUT AND SHUT

Jonathan Peace (jpwritescrime.com)

Hobeck Books (hobeck.net)

£9.99

Three young lads steal a car belonging to a Pakistani family and go for a joyride. The car, a “cut-and-shut” job, suffers a catastrophic failure and all three die horribly. The same night, two young Pakistani men make the mistake of going into a pub owned and operated by the BNP; they are beaten to within an inch of their lives. Britain, 1989: these crimes play out against a backdrop of racial tensions, where white parents are refusing to send their children to the same schools as Pakistani children, and where right wing voices, led by the BNP, are crying out about the erosion of British – of White – values. WDC Louise Miller, her partner WDC Elizabeth Hines, and the rest of the squad at Osset’s Prospect Road CID find themselves in the middle of a veritable minefield as they investigate these two crimes, and quickly discover the connection between them. But these are just the tip of the iceberg.

Cut and Shut is the third in a series of novels featuring DCs Miller and Hines, a fact that is not particularly obvious from looking at the book. As a result, as you might expect, there’s a sense of joining the story late: yes, it’s a standalone mystery, but the returning characters mean that there’s a lot of history and complex relationships that you won’t be aware of. It shouldn’t stop you from enjoying the story, which is nicely self-contained, but it is nice to have a bit of warning in case, like me, you prefer to start at the beginning of these series.

Peace takes the unusual step of presenting what is, essentially, a straightforward police procedural not from the point of view of the Detective Inspector in charge of the team (although we do get a couple of glimpses into the psyche of Bill Manby as the novel progresses), but from that of one of the team’s Detective Constables. Louise Miller is an extremely competent investigator who has, we learn, just recently been passed over for promotion, losing out to a much less qualified man who makes up in connections what he lacks in talent. It also helps, seemingly, that he’s a man. Peace weaves this theme – being a woman in policing in 1980’s Britain – neatly into the overall narrative. It is an important part of the story and the author uses DC Hines, who has been hospitalised as a result of domestic abuse as the story opens, to examine the roles of women in society in general and policing specifically during these less-enlightened times.

But the central theme of Cut and Shut is the endemic racism throughout Britain at that time. It’s a timely examination, given the nationalist movements that seem to characterise modern-day England. While the focus is on the crimes, and on the forces working behind the scenes to foment unrest, Peace tries to paint a realistic picture of the environment in which Miller and Hines are working. The casual racist remarks aren’t restricted to the so-called villains of the piece, but are also encountered when dealing with “ordinary” members of the public, and Miller very quickly notices that members of her own team, as well as the wider police force, share some of these horrible views. There’s a brief chapter partway through that seems unrelated to what’s going on, but serves to give us a taste of what this is like for the ordinary people of the area: two young schoolboys encounter a protest at their school gates. It’s a chilling reminder of just who the victims are.

These are characters you will enjoy spending time with and if, like me, Cut and Shut is your first encounter with them, you will definitely want to backtrack, and find out how they’ve reached this point, There is a danger here of introducing stereotypes, especially on the side of the criminals, but Peace manages to avoid it for the most part. There is, unfortunately, a plot hole big enough to drive a double-decker bus through but, since it doesn’t really affect the outcome, it’s an easy one to ignore and enjoy the rest of the read.

Jonathan Peace shines a light on a dark period of England’s recent history, weaving it into a fast-moving thriller to produce an engaging and enjoyable read. This is a fine example of dark and gritty Brit noir, whose female protagonists give it a slightly different slant to many other novels in a similar space. We haven’t seen the last of DCs Miller and Hines, and the genre is a better place for their inclusion.