THE WHITE CROW

 

Normally, the blurb at the bottom of the front jacket is meaningless.  In this case, it is perfect.

The marvellous originality of this book is that the protagonist, a young police officer who is a wannabe detective, is the daughter of the head of a crime family.  

The other thing that is original (and marvellous) is that her dad, the head of this particular organised crime unit, is really, really likeable.  While the police in the upper echelons are not.  The reader is invited to compare the two forces, and come up with an answer that is not politically correct.

Edward McCarthy (the aforesaid dad) has more or less given up organised crime for a slightly more respectable role, that of a developer.  The trouble is that some dastardly outfit is sabotaging his big development site, which highly annoys Edward, plus his three brothers (who are also extremely likeable).  It turns out that a much more stereotypical organised crime unit (hails from the Balkans, run by sadistic thugs, and headed by a one-eyed character who is straight out of a James Bond movie) is out to take over the McCarthy operation.  By force.  Starting with the takeover of the development business.

At the same time, Philomena McCarthy (the daughter in police uniform) discovers a little girl who is hiding from a murder scene.  The victim is her mother, murdered in the kitchen. At the same time, her father is tied up in his jewellery store with a bomb vest strapped to his chest.  The store, of course, has been comprehensively robbed. Everything is gone, including a stash of diamonds that Edward McCarthy had left with the jeweller, in a money-laundering kind of way.

And the jeweller is rescued by the one likeable policeman in the cast (apart from Philomena, of course). Brendan Keegan by name, he spends the rest of the book trying to make sense of the politically motivated decisions of his higher-ups.  And, in the end, defying them.

So there are the ingredients for a very good, very fast-paced read.  This is no run-of-the-mill police procedural.  For a start, the reader is thoroughly engaged with the characters. Secondly, there is humor.  There are several laugh-out-loud moments, toe punctuate the nailbiting action.

Thoroughly recommended.