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I LOVE MY SMITH AND WESSON
by David Bowker
St Martin's Griffin, August 2004
240 pages
$13.95
ISBN: 0312328257


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

This is a perfect little gem of a book. If you read the blurb it seems unremarkable -- your average lowlifes blasting the hell out of each other on the streets of Manchester. But Bowker takes the crime genre and bends and stretches it into bizarre corners.

I hope you'll find it helpful if I tell you that I LOVE MY SMITH AND WESSON is an unholy mix of crime fiction, horror, noir, black humour, gothic and grand guignol. I don't think I've left anything out , although I wouldn't swear to it.

If I try to explain the plot to you, you'll no doubt think I've been hallucinating. Suffice it to say that it's a modern-day revenge drama with enough bodies piled up to have Shakespeare's mates Ford and Webster drooling.

Writer Billy Dye is finally making the big-time. The American market has picked up on his work, and the film-makers are sniffing around. And a TV series called Gangchester is about to go into production. So he and girlfriend Nikki are having a posh wedding up in Scotland. The big day is rather spoiled, though, by the arrival of your friendly, neighbourhood psycho. Rawhead just happens to be a schoolfriend of Billy's, and it does put a bit of a dampener on festivities when this wild-eyed character appears at the feast. Oh, and bodies hanging from trees tend not to be a centrepoint of any wedding I've ever been to.

Billy owes Rawhead big time from the previous book in the series (which you don't need to have read, incidentally). So he's soon in the midst of Rawhead's plans to take control of the Manchester gang scene.

This is one of those books where none of the characters are the sort of people you'd want to take home to meet your mother. But it doesn't matter a damn, as Bowker is a class writer and keeps you hooked until the final word. I must be going maudlin in my old age (and how the hell do you get maudlin about a serial killer anyway?), but I found myself rooting for Rawhead. And the ending is perfection.

There are plenty of other writers hanging round the horror end of the crime genre. Forget Phil Rickman and John Connolly, though -- Bowker is a one-off where they clearly broke the mould. I LOVE MY SMITH AND WESSON is one of my books of the year. No contest.

Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, October 2004

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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