| Publisher | Canongate Books |
|---|---|
| Date Published | 03 March 2016 |
| ISBN-10 | 1782116389 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1782116387 |
| Format | paperback |
| Pages | 352 |
| Price | £ 14.99 |
Ten Days
by
Scheming politicians take on a new police chief as an incident on a London council estate sets the city ablaze.
Review
Gillian Slovo’s 1980s Kate Baeier books hauled me head-first into crime fiction. So it’s good to see her back in the genre paddling pool.
Ten Days started life as a stage play, and there are traces of its former life occasionally in some thin characterisation and faintly declamatory dialogue. But it’s an absolutely engrossing read – tightly written, bags of tension and you really feel like you’re in the middle of a powder keg London in a baking hot summer.
Cathy Mason isn’t your usual crime fiction main character. She’s an overweight single mother living on a council estate in south London that’s destined for the chop. So no one in authority gives a damn that the central heating in the flats is on full-blast in the middle of a heatwave.
The book opens with Cathy watching the dawn break over the Lovelace estate. By the end of the day the estate is a crime scene. By the end of the week, the city is ablaze with rioting. And Cathy is unwittingly in the midst of it all as her private life collides with her community role on the police authority.
This isn’t just a story of everyday ordinary folk, though. There are scheming politicians and a tough new Metropolitan Police chief in the mix. Everyone has their own agenda, and it’s best not turn your back on anyone, unless you want to be stabbed in the back (literally and metaphorically!)
Cathy, her daughter Lyndell and young neighbour Jayden are by far the most interesting characters in the multi-racial cast. And they are backed up by vivid cameos – the shopkeeper and his mother, the young man who unwittingly sparks the rioting, his dignified parents and the pastor. These are all ordinary people, often struggling to survive, but fortunately lacking the ‘cor, blimey, we’re salt of the earth’ clichés of Eastenders and other TV dramas.
The politicians tend towards the rather one-dimensional, as do the police. But in many ways it’s not their story. Ten Days is a stark tale, told in harsh, stripped-back prose. The story could (and almost certainly did) come from the newspaper front pagers and feels searingly and scarily real.
Ten Days started life as a stage play, and there are traces of its former life occasionally in some thin characterisation and faintly declamatory dialogue. But it’s an absolutely engrossing read – tightly written, bags of tension and you really feel like you’re in the middle of a powder keg London in a baking hot summer.
Cathy Mason isn’t your usual crime fiction main character. She’s an overweight single mother living on a council estate in south London that’s destined for the chop. So no one in authority gives a damn that the central heating in the flats is on full-blast in the middle of a heatwave.
The book opens with Cathy watching the dawn break over the Lovelace estate. By the end of the day the estate is a crime scene. By the end of the week, the city is ablaze with rioting. And Cathy is unwittingly in the midst of it all as her private life collides with her community role on the police authority.
This isn’t just a story of everyday ordinary folk, though. There are scheming politicians and a tough new Metropolitan Police chief in the mix. Everyone has their own agenda, and it’s best not turn your back on anyone, unless you want to be stabbed in the back (literally and metaphorically!)
Cathy, her daughter Lyndell and young neighbour Jayden are by far the most interesting characters in the multi-racial cast. And they are backed up by vivid cameos – the shopkeeper and his mother, the young man who unwittingly sparks the rioting, his dignified parents and the pastor. These are all ordinary people, often struggling to survive, but fortunately lacking the ‘cor, blimey, we’re salt of the earth’ clichés of Eastenders and other TV dramas.
The politicians tend towards the rather one-dimensional, as do the police. But in many ways it’s not their story. Ten Days is a stark tale, told in harsh, stripped-back prose. The story could (and almost certainly did) come from the newspaper front pagers and feels searingly and scarily real.
Reviewed 12 March 2016 by Sharon Wheeler
