Reviewed By: Ali Karim - RAM
The Fire Baby
Amazon UK PB
Jim Kelly
Class/Genre: Mystery
2004, Michael Joseph
It seems an age since I read Journalist Jim Kelly’s debut novel ‘The Water Clock’ which was nominated for a CWA John Creasey Dagger, and incidentally has just been released in the US. Tackling that tricky second novel, I must report that he has written a corker. We have Journalist Philip Dryden and his odd driver cum chauffer, Humph on a case that like ‘The Water Clock’ has its roots in the past. Dryden’s wife Laura is still in a coma (from her flocked-in syndrome) and Dryden struggles on with his mundane local newspaper job. Laura shares her hospital ward with a woman who twenty-seven years earlier saved a baby from a farmhouse fire when a US airforce plane crashed shortly after take-off from the military base. There are secrets that make this story a complex and sinister affair which is right up-to-date with the trauma of the Iraq conflict. The deathbed confessions of the dying woman cause secrets to become revealed and the linkages to a modern day tragedy unfold. The menacing locales of the Fenland area of England’s East Anglia compensate for some of the over-complications of the plot, but never-the-less this is strong stuff, and very well written.
Ali Karim - RAM
Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Ali Karim - RAM
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