Book Review: Twisted Tracks

Twisted Tracks
By Lesley Horton
(My copy Orion, 2009.)

Family feuds, old secrets and the consequences of greed and weakness are the subject matter of this latest novel from Lesley Horton, one of the most promising and yet least publicized of the current crop of British crime writers.

The setting, her native Bradford with its cultural tensions and simmering discontents, the latter connected in this novel to the 1984 miner’s strike, is faultlessly drawn. The same can be said for her central character DCI John Handford, who finds himself forced to confront a family secret that leads him to question his own integrity.

This is Lesley Horton’s fifth novel featuring Handford and his team and the good news is that the series retains its freshness and ability to comment, without doing so in an intrusively ‘worthy’ way, on the changing nature of British society. In this case through an insurance scam involving impoverished Polish immigrants and different cultural understandings of family ties.

The real mystery is why Orion has done so little to promote one of the most accomplished writers in their stable.