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Danny McRae is an ex-SOE (Special Operations Executive) agent who was captured by the Germans and spent a year in Dachau. He is now running a one-man detective agency in London, the majority of his cases squalid divorce suits. Into his office walks the glamorous crime reporter Eve Copeland, who says that she wants Danny to provide her with an entry into various criminal sides of London life. Danny agrees and takes her along on one of his more exciting jobs involving theft from a warehouse; during the course of this escapade she proves a dab hand with a gun. The theft is successfully resolved but unfortunately means Danny crosses swords with highly unpleasant gangland boss Pauli Gambatti. Danny continues to show Eve around London's seamy side however and they become lovers. He is highly disconcerted when he realises that she is being tailed. She refuses to believe him however and breaks the relationship off; then she disappears and Danny embarks on a desperate quest to find her - a quest which soon lands him in the very dangerous locale of post-war Berlin. Sometimes being a reviewer is a boon; if I had been left to my own devices I doubt whether I would have got beyond the first couple of chapters of this book, for reasons I will come to in a minute, but as I had to review it I was obliged to persist and am very pleased that I did because it improves considerably as it goes along (not, of course, that this is always so). The main problem with this book is the style; it is first-person noir, mean streets, hard man, pulp fiction transported to a European setting, pastiche or homage. This happens to be a style I especially dislike; even one graphic description of the realities of a pub-fight (with which the book opens) is one too many. Behind the style is a tiresome insistence that all this is somehow the only truth, that the noir take on the world is the only true one and very important too. Well it isn't; it is just another version and a not especially appealing one. Fortunately I managed to get beyond this and into the meat of the plot which in fact is much more Le Carre than Chandler and therefore much more apposite to the situation (and appealing to me!). Not that I am suggesting Ferris is in Le Carre's class as an espionage writer, but there is some decent plotting here which carries the book along at a tremendous lick from the point at which Eve disappears. THE UNQUIET HEART still has a tendency to dissolve into rather tedious action sequences at times but the narrative impetus carries one forwards. I think that the mystery element will rather depend on how familiar one is with immediate post-war history; I found little to surprise and guessed the main outlines fairly early. McRae himself is a reasonable protagonist but inevitably there is something a little stereotypical about the cynical first-person narrator, and THE UNQUIET HEART does not really probe or revise the ideologies and assumptions which lie behind this figure. The book makes several references to events in the first in the series (TRUTH DARE KILL) and it might have been helpful to have read this first. Basically there is a very decent yarn here, with a few interesting observations thrown in but the style tends to obscure and detract from the plot.
Reviewed by Nick Hay, October 2008
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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