This is the first of the Inspector John Carlyle novels.
Someone is going around bumping off ex members of an exclusive Toffs club for Cambridge university old boys.
A few of these members are now high up in British politics
The surviving members want to resolve this and also keep this quiet as a General Election is looming.
Inspector Carlyle is a bit of a maverick loner but gets results.
SPOILER ALERT
The murderer is the son of a victim who killed himself back at University after being gang raped by these horrible toffs.
I will look out for more of these novels. The first books in any series are usually about introducing the main and support characters. ( )

Another new series to me; but not one I will be hurrying to follow up, although I notice that book 2 is already on my Kindle. This is OK; another misfit DI, this one in London and definitely not a team player, partly because of his moral code - very straight. This one tells his story from Hendon via Orgreave to Brixton and now Covent Garden, The main plot involves politicians with a past in a posh Oxbridge club, but the characters within it are a bit cartoonish. I'll let the dust settle in my mind before trying the follow-up. ( )

London Calling by James Craig is a 2014 Witness Impulse publication. I was provided a copy of this book by the publisher and Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.

This is the first book in the Inspector Carlyle series. Originally released back in 2011 the series is now with a new publisher and there are several more installments available. However, I don't see myself investing in the series in the future. This one is kind of a mess, to be honest.

The Inspector is tipped off about a dead body in a hotel, and thus begins a convoluted investigation that run alongside a political election and exposes a crime committed many years ago. But, the story deals primarily with the Inspectors personal thoughts about his wife, his boss, and the media and at times the author goes into too much detail when describing things like a police building and detailing it's history. There is very little dialogue among the characters and many scenes are too graphic in their depictions of depraved sexual acts for my taste.

The plot was very slow moving, and not in a good slow building of suspense, but with only an occasional plot twist or big reveal. I very nearly gave up on this one and then the ending made me very angry with myself for sticking with it. Carlyle was a very dull guy and the dialogue was boring with no chemistry between the Inspector and anyone in the book, even his wife whom he only seems to speak with on the phone. Even his daughter seems fine with his frequent disappearances from home.

The author definitely has the right idea, especially when it come to college “clubs”, politics, and corruption. He just needs to create characters that readers will forge a bond with and begin to care about in some way. While I have no problems reading dark, gritty thrillers, this one goes a little overboard at times, but often that is matter of taste. However, when I feel like I might be sick, that's where I draw the line.

I will at times give a series a second chance because the first book can be pretty rough when trying to establish characters and write a compelling thriller too, but it will be a long time before I feel that adventurous.
1.5 rounded to 2 ( )

I’m always honest about the books I read. If this blog seems surprisingly positive, it is because I try my best to see the best in the books I read. With that said, I do my upmost to give honest feedback and can be critical where I feel it is deserved. I did not immediately like London Calling, debut novel of journalist-turned-author James Craig. It took a while to get in, and I was somewhat put off by the crass and uncompromising style of Craig’s writing. Upon reflection, now that I have finished the novel, I am quite pleased to announce that it did in fact hook me in at some stage, and I devoured the second half of the novel in a matter of hours. If you’re open minded to some slightly suggestive and sometimes altogether diabolical scenes and you’re after a thriller that goes beyond the general run-of-the-mill political thrillers, London Calling is the book for you.

Inspector John Carlyle is disliked by most around him, yet as a reader I warmed to him almost instantly. An occasionally disgruntled police officer in his forties, Carlyle has made the rounds of the London police force, and we now find him working out of the Charing Cross station in Central London. What helps the reader get a clearer understanding of Carlyle are Craig’s frequent flashback chapters, which are off-putting to some but really aid in the story development here. The murky worlds of policing and politics are never clear cut, and for the debut novel in what will be a series of novels, a significant back-story is essential to grasp the motives of the characters and place what would otherwise be a series of unrelated events into some context.

As London moves closer to a General Election, someone is grotesquely killing off past members of an old club from Cambridge University. Serial killers are never well received at the best of times, and when other members of the notorious circle include the current mayor and the man tipped to be the next Prime Minister, things become exceptionally complicated. Once the link is made between the club and the gentleman who remain alive, it becomes a dangerous game of cat and mouse as Carlyle and his fellow officers try to protect the most powerful men in the country and unravel the key question of the book: why, after all these years, are the 1984 Merrion Club members being picked off one by one?

I thoroughly enjoyed this book overall. Once I got past the initial backlog of information and composed myself after a particularly graphic murder scene, Craig’s style of writing gripped me and helped me turn the pages almost in a trance. My oh so familiar internal battle of “just one more chapter” was lost in the final 50-or-so pages of the novel as the climax is particularly engrossing. Definitely not for the faint hearted, and not by any means in the same league as personal favourite Stieg Larsson, this novel will please and hopefully thrill lovers of good, gritty political crime. I do suggest it to fellow Larsson lovers though, as Craig’s somewhat deranged killer echoes some of Larsson’s more gruesome ideas. Happily awaiting the second Carlyle novel. ( )

A very gritty and cleverly plotted murder story set in and around Westminster in the run up to a general election.
The principal character is the disaffected DI Carlyle. While the disgruntled loner at odds with authority is hardly a new model for a fictional copper, it works here, and he is entirely convincing. The settings were very well captured too, and I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of City of London School for Girls and Grodzinski's bakery, both of which I recognised as accurate!
It seems as though this is merely the first in a series of novels featuring Detective Inspector Carlyle, and I look forward to it's successors.. ( )