The Price of Darkness: Graham Hurley on Clinical Murder
The Price of Darkness is the eighth outing for D.I. Joe Faraday. As the series has developed, successive narratives have tightened around the two central characters.
One of them is Faraday himself, a painstaking, over-reflective career detective with a grown-up deaf-mute son and a passion for bird watching. His honesty, coupled with a growing despair with a society he sees imploding around him, makes narrative room for an altogether less philosophical cop: Paul Winter, a veteran Detective Constable only too willing to use the darker arts of entrapment and harassment in a generally successful bid to pot the bad guys.
Winter, eternally at odds with his bosses, talks the language of the street. Faraday, increasingly frustrated by the impossibilities of the Job, is equally an outsider.
All the Faraday books are rooted in Portsmouth, a city with a boisterous and thriving criminal culture, much of it devoted to the importation and sale of Class "A" narcotics. Pompey, as the locals call it, is also an island city, densely settled, with area after area offering property developers – bent and otherwise – the richest of pickings.
The clinical murder of one such developer kicks off the action in The Price of Darkness. Assigned to the investigation, Faraday begins to unearth connections that take him to the heart of the New Labour political machine. A second killing, this time of a visiting Government minister, puts Pompey on the nation's front page.
Winter, meanwhile, has been thrown out of the force after a drink-drive incident. This long-overdue settling of CID accounts drives him into the arms of Gazza Mackenzie, drug-baron turned highly successful businessman. To no one's surprise, Winter thrives in his new job.
As an author, I have always found Pompey to be a gift of a city. If you want a glimpse of where UK plc is headed, look no further. Faraday, fittingly enough, will give you some of the clues. While Paul Winter will show you exactly what really underpins our fabled freedoms.
The Price of Darkness is published by Orion
