Richard Burton #01: Breathe

- Blurb -

London, 6 February 1952: The King is dead. The capital's streets are respectfully empty ' wearing a thick norturnal pall of smog, as if those streets themselves mourn his passing. Post-war London is a punch-drunk and hungry place; relentlessly drab and violent, and still beaten down by the years of struggle. Nowhere more so than in the warren of alleys, tracks, yards and tooth-gap bombsites which combine to form Notting Dale, an unloved corner of West London, lying sodden in the lee of Notting Hill. So much for a land fit for heroes. Tonight for once, no-one's on the streets of the Dale and no-one's causing trouble, so Police Constable (Probationary) Richard Bourton should be looking forward to a quiet shift ' without the muggings, rapes and burglaries that the smog and the poverty encourage. Bourton's having a tough time of it in the Dale; doesn't have the authority and the clout of the time-served coppers, and yet he's not like the other probationers either. He's years older for a start, with the best part of a decade in uniform and under arms, serving king and country in Europe and the Far East. After the carnage of D-Day, the bloody push through the Netherlands and into the charnel house of Germany, and then the nightmarish wave upon wave of the enemy in Korea, what fear can the streets of the Dale hold for Bourton? Before his shift even starts, before he can put on whatever thin layer of authority a Met Police uniform conveys, Bourton finds the body of a man, terribly beaten and slowly freezing to death on a patch of waste-ground in the dripping winter. When Bourton saves his life ' twice, in the space of an hour ' Bourton sets in train a series of events, which might just be the makings of him as a proper Copper, bind him ever closer to the claustrophobic world of the Dale, and set him on a path to catching a killer who no one knows even exists. With masterly control that belies a debut, these pages from BREATHE lay down immediately a web of intrigue, suffused with an atmosphere of coppers, spies and killers. Set nearly all within a tight campus of a few square miles of London, the novel pins its plot and characters with microscopic focus. And what characters they are ' living, breathing creations; alive on the page in their actions and thoughts, and hopes and fears, as they are at the heart of all the best thrillers. These smog-bound streets form a character in themselves, the root and the heart and the engine of this novel, a winning evocation of time and place. BREATHE introduces Dominick Donald as a new voice in British fiction ' think of the place where you'd expect to find the class and elegance of William Boyd, meeting the period edge and menace of Alan Furst, and with the slow-burn set-up and worldly confidence of Robert Harris or of A. D. Miller's SNOWDROPS, and you're some of the way there.