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Hachette Livre, this edition first published Nov 2006
Reviewed by Sunnie Gill
Meet Lily. Lily is the wife of London gangster Patrick Brodie, and the
mother of a tribe of children fathered by several men. CLOSE follows the
story of two generations of the family, living in the violent gangland
world of London from the 1960s through to the nineties.
CLOSE follows the fortunes of the family by chronicling Lil’s life. Born
into a poor household with indifferent and sometimes neglectful parents,
Lil meets Patrick at the age of fifteen and is married to him by sixteen.
Lil’s status rises with Patrick’s success in the underworld and falls
again upon his murder at the hands of rivals.
This is a case where the author would have been well served by using the
“less is more” philosophy. For example, three pages are devoted to
Patrick’s infidelities: when he’s unfaithful, his attitude towards the
women, how his wife feels about him cheating. It’s just too much. One
paragraph would have been sufficient. Another instance is the murder of
Patrick on his son’s birthday. Men rush into the house and repeatedly stab
and beat him to death in front of his wife and children. The author
relates this event, and then proceeds to retell it from the point of view
of several people present. The problem with this is that she is merely
restating the same thing with slightly different wording. The reader is
offered no new insights into the event. Handled differently, it could have
been a brutally stunning passage. However any impact the violence might
have had is dulled by this heavy handed overkill.
Author Martina Cole seems to know about the sub-culture of which she
writes, and the story could give the reader a real glimpse into this
culture of crime. However, plot is a bit thin on the ground and
predictable and the characters are one-dimensional shadows of what they
could have been. In fact, I didn't care for most of them at all. There was
little to like about them and nothing to admire. The book also suffers
from being about two hundred pages too long. Martina Cole has many fans. I
hope CLOSE doesn’t disappoint them as it did me.
One last thing. By page 100, my copy of the book had started to come
adrift from the spine and pages were falling out. I’m reasonably careful
with the books I read, I don’t turn down the pages and I don’t bend back
the spine. I was lucky: the publishers very kindly gave me a copy of CLOSE
to review. Had I paid the retail price of $32.95, I would have been most
unhappy to find the book falling apart just one quarter of the way through
reading it.
November 2006 review first published on Murder & Mayhem
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