I Was Dora Suarez - Derek Raymond

This is a hard book to read. Not just because of the distinctive writing style, but because of the horrors that unfold. This is without doubt the most noirish British crime thriller ever written. There are few books where none of the main characters have any redeeming features, but this is one of those few. It is difficult to warm to any of them: victims, police, criminals, all of them are unsympathetic. If there is one exception it is Dora Suarez herself, though we never get to meet her properly (to say more would be to spoil the book). The story revolves around the search for a vicious psychopath. Set in and around the West End, it allows Derek ...

For some reason, I wasn't too impressed with this first time through: it seemed to be full of thuggish, bullying police behavior and rubbishy mysticism in a search for a psychotic serial killer in modern London; a second attempt revealed it to be a very good, intelligent, crisply-written-in-modern-fashion book, "metaphysical" in a sufferable sense. The style requires some concentration: it's a kind of baroque Hemmingway. Squeamish readers might not like some of the descriptions, because there is a lot of violence against both men and women in the book, but it isn't as dubious as it is in books like Silence of the Lambs. ...