City of Sinners – A little too close to home

AA Dhand once again uses his knowledge of Bradford, racism to take the reader on a tour de force of a thriller. As an author Dhand has the wonderful ability of being able to draw in the reader, and in what seems five minutes you are one hundred pages in and cannot book the down. As someone that lives on the correct side of the Pennines, he actually makes Bradford, on the wrong side of the Pennines sound interesting.

Harry Virdee is called out to a case in the middle of Bradford, when he arrives, he asks his inspector what the call is about. Entering the bookshop dangling from the roof is a dead woman, it could be suicide he thinks, when he gets closer things take a turn. He notices there has been a struggle and that the victim besides being Asian has been hung with barbed wire.

It is during the autopsy that things take a turn for the weird, as they eyelids are moving while on the table, and they all know she is dead. When then unpick and open the eyelids a wasp flies out of each eye socket, where the eyes once were. These wasps were definitely not the common sort of wasp that is seen in Britain. When a message is also pulled out of the window socket addressed to Harry, he has no idea what he is about to embark on.

As another dead body turns up, it appears that Harry is being taunted by the murderer, who is accusing him of knowing the reason why the murders are happening. Pity Harry cannot see it just yet, but when it comes closer to home, he starts to ask the right questions, but then he may need to go beyond the law.

Once again AA Dhand has crafted a brilliant thriller which leaves you questioning all the time. It also shows that every family in every community, no matter the heritage can be dysfunctional. He tackles issues that where others fear to tread and does it brilliantly.

An excellent thriller and Harry Virdee as a character continues to develop and I cannot wait for his next outing. ( )

‘[Bradford is] not like anywhere else. It’s … I don’t know, sort of like Gotham. You’ve got to stay in the shadows sometimes, become the city. Understand its energy, the good and the bad. And there’s some dark things to come, maybe darker than we’ve ever known.’

In this third powerful crime thriller from Bradford-born author A A Dhand, Detective Harry Virdee is drawn into another grisly murder case, after the body of a young Muslim girl is found hanging from the rafters in Waterstones bookshop. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, she is only the first victim – and the killer is baiting Harry with each death, making the investigation personal. When a high-profile victim is kidnapped and the stakes are raised, Harry must search his past to unlock the clues to the killer’s identity, while finally facing the ongoing rift with his parents when his father is taken seriously ill.

Dhand’s Harry Virdee novels, about a Bradford homicide detective from a Sikh family who is married to a Muslim woman, both having been violently cast out by their families, make for compulsive reading, especially for Bradfordians. (I know I’ll never be able to visit Waterstones again with looking up!) The plots are always fast-paced, if occasionally a little confusing (Girl Zero) or in this case, contrived, and the Bradford setting is both eerily recognisable and culturally informative. Virdee’s family life, happily married to Saima yet cut off from his parents, shares an equal focus with his detective work, and the ‘brown on brown’ racism faced by Asian families in the city is always lurking beneath the surface: ‘In this city, brown versus white is enough hatred for me. Yet from what I’ve learned working alongside you, there’s layers of hate even within that’, observes Virdee’s partner. In the course of the murder investigation, Harry suspects arranged marriage to be the motive, with the victims dressed for a traditional Muslim wedding (along with a ghoulish sting in the tale for Harry!)

Entertaining and ‘unputdownable’, City of Sinners is another express tour through Bradford’s underworld. Having read the previous two instalments fairly recently, the climax does seem slightly repetitive, and there is a definite ‘book to film’ flavour in the action scenes (a TV adaptation is already in the pipeline!), but Harry – and his strong but suffering wife Saima – are so well-crafted that they can easily carry off the odd cliché with style. Recommended. ( )

For Detective Harry Virdee life is just getting more and more complicated. His estranged father is ill and may not survive but this has meant that his wife and mother have finally met. His brother Ronnie is still mired in the drugs trade and mourning the loss of his daughter. Meanwhile three women have been killed in Bradford with the killer implying that they are sinners and that there is a link to Harry. However when the killer kidnaps the daughter of the Home Secretary, a whole other level of attention is about to focus on Harry and he'll need to cross lines irrevocably.
AA Dhand has written a series of books about Harry Verde and set in Bradford. Each gets better than the last and this latest is brilliant. Living close to Bradford I know the city and I know the delicate relationships between the different cultures which Dhand understands and uses for his plots. Here there is racism and concerns about immigration but with gentle twists and nothing is laboured, just appears subtly and is manipulated beautifully. Just to top it off, there is a really exciting link into the next in the series. ( )