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Fractious
London in the 1980's drugs and prostitution are rife and to survive you have to be one hard hearted bastard with eye's in the back of your head. That's Linda Gerraty and Paulie Santini to a but Linda has one weakness her Son Luke. Linda gave Luke up for adoption when she was a crack addicted street whore but now Luke's all grown up and Linda wants him back. Over the years Linda's evolved into a revered and despised madam with a main stake in the drugs trade, clubs all over town and a hard core base of enforcers but someone has a score to settle with Linda that has lasted almost twenty years and that someone is Jez Watson. Shirley Watson and Linda Gerraty had been friends and worked the streets together for years and at one time Jez had thought Linda was family but all that changed when Jez hit adolescence and Linda took him as her lover. Spite, greed and jealousy crept in to the Women's relationship and Shirley would suffer the consequences for almost twenty years. Jez burnt with desire to exact revenge on the Woman he has learnt to hate and didn't care how he got it but tragedy strikes and Jez will regret crossing Linda for the rest of his days on Earth.
276 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 6, 2011
This book had a good cover – it certainly stood out on the shelf at my local library. At first I thought the title said ‘Fractions’ – good disguise, really – an almost maths book cover for a book that’s basically about vice, vice and more vice.
To give the author her due, the plot was pretty well thought out, the characters introduced in an imaginative way, and there was an admirable sense of forward motion about the whole thing. It was oozing with filth, debauchery and smut from start to finish, and though I accept there is a market for that sort of thing I guess I’m not in it. I did think the bad language was overdone – even the third person narrative voice found it necessary to state that it was ‘pissing it down’ rather than raining. Too much coarse language takes the edge off the expletives that are justified, and I’ve got no problem with swearing in the right place.
The main reason for my one star rating was the abysmal grammar, spelling and punctuation. This is a book crying out for a decent proof-reader and editor. I’m guessing it’s self published as there is surely no way so many howlers would have made it through the net otherwise. Barely a sentence goes by without a rogue apostrophe (there’s even one in the blurb on the back cover), an initial capital that shouldn’t be there, or a spelling mistake. And the author really needs to insert some commas to break up her absurdly long sentences. A decent edit would clear all this up, and aside from a rushed ending and a first person narrative that mutated seamlessly into third person part way through, this would be a half decent novel. As it is, given the content and the cock-ups (perhaps an unfortunate choice of words under the circumstances) what it did feel like was the scribbling of an adolescent under the duvet with a torch because Mum has said it’s time for lights out.
To give the author her due, the plot was pretty well thought out, the characters introduced in an imaginative way, and there was an admirable sense of forward motion about the whole thing. It was oozing with filth, debauchery and smut from start to finish, and though I accept there is a market for that sort of thing I guess I’m not in it. I did think the bad language was overdone – even the third person narrative voice found it necessary to state that it was ‘pissing it down’ rather than raining. Too much coarse language takes the edge off the expletives that are justified, and I’ve got no problem with swearing in the right place.
The main reason for my one star rating was the abysmal grammar, spelling and punctuation. This is a book crying out for a decent proof-reader and editor. I’m guessing it’s self published as there is surely no way so many howlers would have made it through the net otherwise. Barely a sentence goes by without a rogue apostrophe (there’s even one in the blurb on the back cover), an initial capital that shouldn’t be there, or a spelling mistake. And the author really needs to insert some commas to break up her absurdly long sentences. A decent edit would clear all this up, and aside from a rushed ending and a first person narrative that mutated seamlessly into third person part way through, this would be a half decent novel. As it is, given the content and the cock-ups (perhaps an unfortunate choice of words under the circumstances) what it did feel like was the scribbling of an adolescent under the duvet with a torch because Mum has said it’s time for lights out.
Displaying 1 of 1 review