The Communion of Saints - John Barlow

When good and evil come home...

Following the murder of his father, John Ray is getting his life back on track, and putting the criminal past of his family behind him. But when Shirley Kirk of the West Yorkshire Police asks him for a favour, he's sucked into a mystery that is as confusing as it is devastating. Discreetly.

John soon begins to uncover a complex mystery involving blackmail, kidnap and murder. But why are the police really asking for his help? There are people on the Force still out to get John Ray for his past misdemeanours. And they are not the only ones who know about his family's past.

A novel set in the city of Leeds, THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS is novel about innocence, vengeance, and the power of good and evil. It is the third crime thriller in the John Ray / LS9 series.

I read and enjoyed the first book in this series several years ago, and I liked this one quite a bit, too. The plot has some nice twists, and John Ray is a flawed but sympathetic protagonist. The best thing, though, is John Barlow's writing, which is really smooth and skillful. An excellent British thriller and well worth reading.

Hope Road - John Barlow

I hadn't read a British mystery in a while, and John Barlow's HOPE ROAD was a good choice to change that. It's a thriller with a little bit of police procedural thrown in, as protagonist John Ray, the son of a notorious British gangster, attempts to go straight with his business of selling second-hand luxury cars. John even has a girlfriend on the police force, Detective Constable Denise Danson. So he has plenty of motivation for getting to the bottom of things when one of the cars from his showroom goes missing and then turns up with the corpse of a young woman in its trunk. Not only that, but John's friend and top salesman, also missing, is considered by the police as the leading suspect in the woman's murder.

Barlow throws in plenty of twists before everything is untangled, since of course nothing in the case is exactly what it seems to be, and he spins the yarn in fast-paced, very readable prose. I'm not a big fan of books written in the present tense, but Barlow makes that technique work here. He also does a good job with the setting, the English city of Leeds, and made me feel like I'd been there. (Which I haven't, of course. I don't even go as far as Dallas unless I have to.)

HOPE ROAD is a fine novel, the first in a series, and I look forward to reading the others.