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PHOENIX
by John Connor
Orion, December 2003
304 pages
9.99GBP
ISBN: 0752857746


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

John Connor's first novel PHOENIX has a curiously dated feel to it. It's set in 1996 and feels more like the 1980s. There seems no apparent reason for this choice and, in fact, in light of the plot denouement, it would make far more sense for it to be thrown forward to the present day.

A huge police manhunt -- Operation Phoenix -- is launched after Detective Sergeant Phil Leech and his informer Fiona Mitchell are found shot dead on the South Pennine moors in Yorkshire. Detective Constable Karen Sharpe, Leech's work partner, should have met both of them that night, but drink and bad memories intervened.

If you've read Carol O'Connell's Mallory series, that will give you some idea of what the character of Karen Sharpe is like -- cold, remote and a maverick. But whereas Mallory is just about buyable and is surrounded by some fascinating characters, Sharpe isn't -- and you may well get to the end of the book and wonder, as I did, how the heck she got to where she is. She goes off on her own all through a double murder enquiry, and routinely treats her senior officers like dirt without any comeback. In fact, it got me thinking about that old chestnut -- whether men can 'write' female characters. Some of her reactions to key events -- particularly at the end of the book -- seem more than slightly 'off.'

Connor is a senior criminal lawyer in West Yorkshire and obviously knows the system inside-out. But, despite some workmanlike prose, there is too much reliance on a fairly cliched plotline, stereotypical policemen (and yes, I mean men) and some seriously underdeveloped characters. In fact, despite the book being set in and around Bradford, it has a totally WASP feel, with the occasional black character only wandering on as a drug dealer or other assorted baddie.

The final scenes almost pull off some of the tension and menace that should have been present throughout. I'd guessed one of the plot twists concerning Karen's mysterious past very early on, but the significant other one late on left me mouthing 'no way.'

The book has an oddly detached tone as it moves between Sharpe and her Detective Chief Superintendent John Munro. But it never engages properly with either and it left me wishing that Connor had spent more time developing some well-rounded characters, rather than relying on the dysfunctional loner cliche.

Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, March 2004

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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