A.A. Abbott

GREAT CRIME STORY WRITER

drugs

Book Review – Broken Windows, by Janet Pywell

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A glamorous female sleuth

Broken Windows Female Sleuth Thriller Book Review
Broken Windows features mystery, action and adventure…

The glamorous Mikky dos Santos is a poacher turned gamekeeper.  She’s been a forger and an art thief, but now she’s turned from the dark side to work for Europol. “Broken Windows”, published on 30th June 2020, is the latest thriller to feature the colourful female sleuth. Mikky’s latest task is to spy on a London drugs gang, who use cultish practices to draw in deprived children longing for love and money. The cult’s talisman is an ancient and valuable dagger, and Mikky is charged with finding it.

Action in Morocco and London

At first, the assignment is fun. Mikky and her sidekick, ex-SAS serviceman Peter, go undercover in Morocco. Saintly charity worker Matt has rescued several teenagers from the cult and kept others from its temptations by training them in parkour. They’re so skilled in the extreme sport that they’re employed to act in a film being shot in Morocco. Mikky and Peter join them there, pretending to be photographers making a documentary.

Mikky learns enough to satisfy her boss, suave Spaniard Joachin, but by now she’s in too deep. Having bonded with the teenagers, she can’t just walk away when she realises the cult threatens their lives. Staying in touch with the youths when they return to their sink estate in London, she risks death to save them.

Everything a great thriller should be

The story not only fizzes with action (and, it has to be said, a touch of jetsetting), but offers interesting insights into both parkour and the high-end art world. There’s also a political angle, with an election looming and politicians desperate to smash the drugs ring and bring the public some good news. With adventure, twists and a happy ending, “Broken Windows” is everything a great thriller should be.

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Do you like thrillers showcasing female sleuths? British mystery thriller “The Bride’s Trail” is one of the best in the genre – click on the cover to start reading.

When Crime Pays – Narconomics, a Book Review

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When I’m writing a crime thriller, I get advice from specialists – prison officers, policemen and even a farmer who once grew hemp (the legal equivalent of cannabis). One of these experts recommended “Narconomics”.

“You won’t know what drives criminals until you understand the economics of the drugs trade,” he said, assuring me that “Narconomics” would explain just that.

I expected the book, written by “Economist” journalist Tom Wainwright, to be rather dry. It turned out to be anything but. Wainwright describes meeting murderous central American crime bosses, harassed-looking lawmen and colourful designer chemical developers. He delves into the dark web, finding drugs freely available from dealers with feedback ratings just like sellers on ebay. A little old lady tells him about her heroin addiction, while Colorado’s cannabis entrepreneurs trumpet the jobs they’ve created since the drug was legalised. The goods and services on offer include weed tours and whacky chocolate as well as the predictable reefer shops.

Throughout his journey, Wainwright explains how criminals are seizing opportunities to supply products for which a demand exists. Just like a legal business, they must balance risk and reward. The extreme violence used by Mexican cartels and the friendly customer service from online dealers are two sides of the same coin, and no accident: they’re a rational response to market forces.

Although the book is free from graphs and turgid tables of figures, Wainwright occasionally refers to statistics. He shows how consumption of drugs hasn’t fallen despite the billions of taxpayers’ money spent on (attempting) to reduce the supply. Accordingly, he suggests that governments target demand. Prevention, he says, is cheaper than cure. Controversially, he also advocates legalisation. As an aside, he says that Colorado’s new marijuana factories and jobs might not survive worldwide weed liberalisation: global corporations would grow the product more cheaply in Asia and South America.

“Narconomics” is subtitled “How to Run a Drug Cartel”. It doesn’t deliver on this grandiose claim, and anyone expecting a primer in setting up an illegal business will be sadly disappointed. However, as an entertaining account of the business side of the drugs trade, “Narconomics” should be of interest both to readers and writers of crime fiction.

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My last crime thriller, “The Grass Trail” followed the fortunes of a drugs baron desperately trying to escape from his south London prison, and a Brummie businessman dallying with dope farmers in order to grow raw materials for a cancer-busting drug. Check it out here.

Characters I Hate, and Why

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Some fictional characters are a joy to write about. I paid tribute to them in my blog last week. There are others, by contrast, that I hate. Every word added to the page is a triumph of willpower. Because I immerse myself in each character’s mind and thoughts, that’s a big challenge when his or her values are very different from mine.

Nowhere was that more evident than the chapters devoted to Jeb in my latest crime thriller, The Bride’s Trail. Apart from loving his mother, he has no redeeming features. Jeb is an East End villain, selling Class A drugs and running a string of prostitutes whom he’s hooked on his wares. Greed is his sole motivator. He lies, steals and kills without a second thought. The mind of a psychopath is a depressing place indeed. You can meet Jeb, and Kat, who gets the better of him – just – in short story The Gap, a “5 minute crime thriller”.

After The Interview brought Boris, a coward, womaniser and murderer. While I hoped to make his emotions and actions understandable to readers, I doubt that he was loveable. I couldn’t love him myself. His infidelity, the bullying treatment of the Polish concierge and the paranoid execution of his best friend were almost enough to drive a writer to drink. Boris hit the bottle instead…

By comparison, I said last week that autistic Jed Gardner was my favourite character in After The Interview. That’s not the whole story. His episodes of anger and misery cast a grey cloud over my life, and a huge sigh of relief when he finally found peace of mind. I was challenged by outrageous Tony, the womanising tobacco chief executive of Up In Smoke, too. An unreconstructed chauvinist and Big Tobacco poster boy, he was fun – but I still gritted my teeth as he sold tobacco to smugglers and treated attractive women as every bit as disposable as a piece of Kleenex. Interestingly, Tony wasn’t based on a real person, but several readers thought they knew him! A case of truth being stranger than fiction?

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Which fictional character do you love to hate, and why? Please drop me a line at aaabbottstories[at]gmail.com and let me know! As a British crime thriller writer, I’m open to feedback and suggestions for new angles. In fact, reader feedback is so important to me that every draft crime thriller is read by a panel of 20 beta readers before a final rewrite!