Jay Stringer

Jay Stringer doesn't re-invent the hardboiled detective genre here, but he offers an engrossing story and an impressive debut.
Stringer himself calls his stories 'social pulp'. I like that and I think it fits.

Eoin Miller, half Roma, ex-cop, works as PI in the Midlands - which is an euphemism for being an errand boy for the Mann brothers, one of the two rivaling crime syndicates in Wolverhampton. One morning, Eoin wakes up to find his almost-one night stand dead in his bed, strangled with his tie. After fighting his first impulse to run, Eion sets out to investigate - and soon finds himself deeply involved in the world of drug dealing, while the bodies keep piling up. To top it all off, he also agrees to find a missing student.

Stringer drops enough hints to make the missing person case kind of obvious. Seriously, that was rather lame. But that's really my only complaint here. Stringers' prose flows easily, he has a knack for dialogue and pacing, and there's just the right amount of grim humour. Eoin's not very hardboiled (and has a terrible taste in music, 'depressing male bollocks' indeed), but I found this quite refreshing. His Romani heritage doesn't play a big part in this story, but it's there enough to give him a believable background. Also very much there is the Black Country, the former industrial region wasting away, with corruption flowering in every corner. 

A promising start to the trilogy. On to the next.