Time To Win by Harry Brett

Time To Win by Harry Brett
Buy Time To Win by Harry Brett at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Crime
Reviewer: Lesley Mason
Summary: A fairly plodding Great Yarmouth Godfather tale of the apparent suicide of local crime boss and the beginnings of a wife wanting to take over the family business. I can see it working as a TV adaptation but as a novel, it left me disengaged.
Buy? No	Borrow? Maybe
Pages: 352	Date: April 2016
Publisher: Corsair
ISBN: 978-1472152626
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I have no idea what Great Yarmouth has ever done to Harry Brett, but, boy, is he getting his own back! Now personally, I don't much like the town, and I know it has its seedy side, like most places, but I can't believe it's quite this bad. According to Brett, the weather's as dreary as the down'n'outs, the streets are grim, and the people worse. He makes the point that no-one comes to Yarmouth for their summer holidays anymore…if that wasn't true before this book, it's likely to be so afterwards. If a place could sue for defamation of character, the town would want to.

The opening shot is of Richard Goodwin going down into the murky waters of the Yare out back of his office. Goodwin was not a good person – despite what his publicity machine would have you believe. He was always about how much good he was doing locally – and to be fair there was some of that – mostly though, he was working whatever systems he could. When his body is pulled from the river, it's called as suicide, but his widow Tatiana has other ideas. She is convinced that he was murdered.

The only question is how and by who.

Actually, that's not the only question. There is a whole host of questions… not least among them is: what exactly were his business interests?

Of course there was the Casino project – trying to get investors for a super-casino that would breathe new life into the fading fortunes of the town – and probably the occasional back-hander to people on the council, but what else? Waking up from years of feeling controlled, turning a blind eye to her husband's sexual straying, laced with anti-depressants and kept quiet with the high-flying lifestyle and knowing her kids were being taken care of career-wise, the not-totally-grieving widow Tatty (Tatiana? I mean, really?) decides it is time for her to take over the family business. She just needs to find out exactly what that business really is.

The kids are in on the ground floor…eldest Ben is money-mover in the city, and his sister a lawyer likewise, whilst the youngest is just about to head off for university but has been spending the summer crewing luxury yachts that might be carrying more than fare-paying passengers.

Meanwhile, it looks like someone else is moving in on the turf…low-level types turn up with shiny weaponry, local drug dealers suddenly have more knowledge about connections than is good for them, and there are some seriously ostentatious vehicles littering the out-of-season sea-front.

There's a germ of a good idea in here. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really grow into anything. There are too many problems for this to be a truly satisfying read.

For a start the set-up of the crime…the how and where of the car going into the water is too obviously impossible for suicide, it can only be murder (tension opportunity lost right from the off).

The characters are such stock issue that it can only be assumed we'll learn more about them as the 'promised' series unfolds. Back-stories are sensibly only alluded to, but what we know of Tatiana's is sufficient for me to be absolutely sure that the one nick-name she wouldn't allow anyone to call her by is Tatty. I'll accept that there is a core of steel in her, to have got her where she is, and to have chosen to put up with a lot of the past, but even so the switch-around from polished-up-trash-into-trophy-wife to crime-boss-ascendant happens way too quickly. She's also a bit too sneery about the locals – given where she came from.

A sense of place is not conjured by taking your characters around the town street by named street. The reverse is needed…description and feel should tell the locals where you are without naming. For the non-locals the street-map approach is irritating rather than illuminating. All of that might work if the writing were stylish (it isn't) or if there was either a sustained tension or dramatic plot twists (no, on both counts). The worst crime of all however is the lack of a resolution. The whole thing feels like an elongated staging for whatever is planned to actually happen next. I won't be bothering to find out.

All of that said…it gets some stunning praise from writers in the field…Ian Rankin, Tony Parsons, Nicci French all appear to rate it far more highly than I did. Each to their own; who knows it might be your cup of poison.

For more nefarious dealings in the East of England we can recommend East of Innocence by David Thorne and the follow-up Nothing Sacred by David Thorne

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You can read more book reviews or buy Time To Win by Harry Brett at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy Time To Win by Harry Brett at Amazon.com.

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