“I have loved the ’50s style since I was a kid and don’t know why . . .”

Fair enough, but I doubt that would hold up in court.

Some of you will already know Alison Bruce, being that she is something of a face on the UK rockin’ scene: a DJ, promoter and lifelong rockabilly aficionado, who can be found boppin’ the night away to the likes of Johnny Burnette, Carl Perkins or Ronnie Self at any number of events, such as Bomber Command, the 78 RPM Sessions and Bop-A-Lena’s, to name but a few. She is also a successful writer of crime novels.

Cambridge probably wouldn’t be the first place you’d think of when considering the machinations of criminal endeavour, but it is said that even gilded palaces have dark shadows, and if this writer’s books are anything to go on, this charming university town has more than its fair share. 

“There is nothing like a historic city, students and picturesque landmarks to inspire murder,” says our author. 

Certainly the students, but I digress . . .

Straight outta Croydon and over to Swindon, where she grew up, Bruce now resides in the Badlands of Cambridgeshire, where she has created an impressive oeuvre of psychological thrillers, perhaps the best known being the critically acclaimed DC Goodhew series. Well, now there’s a new badge in town: Detective Sergeant Veronica ‘Ronnie’ Blake.

Hot on the heels of Because She Looked Away, the second instalment of the Ronnie Blake series arrives on the scene by the name of Crash and Burn: a saga where the past is always waiting in those shadows to re-emerge and wreak havoc in the here and now. In this case two bodies are discovered in a derelict house fire. DS Blake is a member of the beleaguered DEAD team who are tasked with unravelling a mystery that links the bodies and the twenty years between them.

So, is kitchen-sink police-procedural a thing? Well, it is now. Despite her astuteness and tenacity there is certainly something of the dowdy, down-at-heel, cornered dog about Ronnie Blake. Haunted by a childhood trauma and the recent death of her sister, she now finds herself performing a treacherous high-wire act of keeping ‘the life’ at bay while attempting to be a good auntie to her orphaned nephew. Then one good twist deserves another when the case turns personal, exacerbating the aftermath of Blake’s own crash and burn.

Bruce has seamlessly transferred a hard-contrast black & white palette of classic noir to the decidedly non-metropolitan pastoral environs of Cambridge. There are twists, turns and mayhem aplenty, so fans of Anne Cleves and the ‘Queen of Crime’ herself, Patricia Highsmith, should go for this in a big way. Crash and Burn fulfils the promise of its predecessor and promises even darker proceedings from its sequels. Cosy mystery, this ain’t.

“I spent my teens switching between classic English crime and American hard-boiled,’ says Ms. Bruce, ‘but it wasn’t until I suddenly thought of a new way of murdering people that I was inspired to try crime stories of my own.”

     And it shows.

So, should you encounter her on the street or at some rockin’ event, just smile, say hello and keep walking . . . or you might wind up under the floorboards of her next protagonist.

A.D. Stranik

Buy a copy of ‘Crash And Burn’ here

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