No witnesses, no fingerprints - only a positive ID of the victim as an immigrant with a long list of enemies.
Detectives Zigic and Ferreira are called in from the Hate Crimes Unit to track the killer, and are met with silence in a Fenland community ruled by slum racketeers, people-trafficking gangs and fear.
Tensions rise.
The clock is ticking.
But nobody wants to talk.
Long Way Home by Eva Dolan was published by Vintage in June 2014. I read Long Way Home back in October of last year, and now have the next in the series to read. I realised that my review wasn't on my blog, so here it is, in preparation for the next episode.
This is a bleak, violent, no-holds-barred crime novel that is exposes the darker side of the issue of migrant workers and their gang masters in the fens around Peterborough.
DI Zigic and DS Ferreira work on the Hate Crime Unit and when a man is burnt alive in a garden shed, their investigations reveal a complex and incredibly violent underworld in a fairly run-down and deprived Peterborough. Both of these Police Officers are from ethnic minority backgrounds, a fact that helps and sometimes hinders their investigations.
Be prepared for some pretty full-on, explicit scenes of cruelty and suffering in Long Way Home, but also be prepared for an extremely well written crime story that explores issues that many of us are unaware of. Eva Dolan writes with authenticity, her descriptive prose is excellent and her two main characters are very well formed.
Zigic and Ferreira are complex characters, each with their own complications and distinct story, so different to each other, yet the perfect partners for investigation crime and getting to the bottom of things.
Eva Dolan, Zigic and Ferreira are welcome additions to the world of the police procedure series; new and exciting, great writing, fast moving plot and exploring a theme that has rarely been written about in fiction. This is gritty and real, often uncomfortable, sometimes shocking, but very impressive.
Eva Dolan is an Essex-based copywriter and intermittently successful poker player. Shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger for unpublished authors when she was just a teenager, her début novel Long Way Home, the start of a major new crime series starring two detectives from the Peterborough Hate Crimes Unit, was published in 2014 to widespread critical acclaim.
Find out more about Eva Dolan at Loitering With Intent
Follow her on Twitter @eva_dolan
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I read this quite a while ago as well. I had heard so much about it that I was really looking forward to it. I have to say I was disappointed because every British person in it was bad and every immigrant was good. I didn't warm to any of the characters and won't be in a hurry to read the next book.
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