A Matter of Blood

February 4, 2013
In a near-future London of financial insecurity and increasing social inequity, Det. Insp. Cass Jones is saddled with two challenging but otherwise mundane cases: one involving the deaths of two boys, apparently gunned down accidentally during the attempted assassination of a notorious crime lord, and the other involving a nihilistic serial killer called Man of Flies. Then Cass learns his brother, Christian, has murdered Christian’s wife and son before turning the gun on himself; Cass’s affair with Christian’s wife is quickly uncovered, and Cass’s fingerprints are found on Christian’s gun. The occult overtones and heavy-handed corporatist futurism are minor distractions from the heart of this book, which is a perfectly acceptable British-style police procedural centered on a cop who is just morally compromised enough to drive the plot and idealistic enough to be an impediment to the true villains. While clearly a series launch, this competent novel can be enjoyed on its own merits, albeit more for the investigation than the speculative elements.

March 1, 2013
A serial killer, marital strife and a family tragedy dog a London cop in a police procedural that hits all the marks--and then some. Pinborough opens by setting out the classic elements of a police procedural. London DI Cass Jones arrives at Money-penny's, a sleek pub, to pick up his monthly payoff that lets owner Artie Mullins operate as he pleases. Jones has no compunction about the arrangement--that's how cops survive in this miasmic London of the near future, afflicted by recession, terrorism and a new strain of AIDS that defies treatment. Jones has his own problems with cocaine and a dark moment in his past. But like all the characters here, he's nuanced: He's not entirely cynical and believes he can navigate the shoals of his unhappy department to solve cases, two of which he faces at the moment. The first involves the gruesome serial killings of four women over two months. Across the women's nude bodies are scrawled in blood the words, "NOTHING IS SACRED." And around the edges of their eyes, tiny eggs hatch maggots. The second case involves the murders of two young boys whose misfortune it was to be at the site of a drive-by gangland murder. Jones is barely on the case, which he works with a colleague with whom he had an extramarital affair and a bullying boss, before his brother, his brother's son and wife (with whom Jones also had an affair) are found brutally slain. Worse, compelling evidence, including samples of Jones' semen on the murdered wife, point to the DI as the culprit. His supervisor takes him off the case, his wife spurns him, and he's left mostly alone to clear himself and solve the other cases. Then Pinborough smoothly blends another element: The case may have supernatural underpinnings. Nuanced characters, evocative settings, tricky plot connections and a spin on genre conventions mark what appears to be the start of a distinctive series.

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March 15, 2013
At first, Pinborough's novel appears to be a traditional police procedural, with Detective Inspector Cass Jones hunting a particularly fiendish serial killer while also trying to nail the perpetrator of a failed assassination attempt that took the lives of two boysand dealing with the murder of his brother's wife and son, crimes for which he may be a suspect. But soon we realize there's more going on here. The book is set in a gloomy near future: London has been devastated by the collapsing economy, and the police have been forced to forge a sort of off-the-books alliance with the city's criminal element. As we move further into the story, we begin to see tantalizing hints of something supernatural lurking behind the scenes, something that casts everything Cass is working onnot to mention Cass himselfin a frighteningly new light. The first of a series called The Forgotten Gods (previously published in the UK under the series title The Dog-Faced Gods), this cross between mystery, urban fantasy, and horror should play equally well to audiences of all three genres.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)