Review: Sirens by Joseph Knox

So short and dramatic has Joseph Knox written the chapters in his debut crime thriller, you'll lose hours at night allowing yourself to read '˜just one more'.
PAGE-TURNER: Joseph Knox's crime thriller Sirens is out now.PAGE-TURNER: Joseph Knox's crime thriller Sirens is out now.
PAGE-TURNER: Joseph Knox's crime thriller Sirens is out now.

Page-turner is the only word for it. We meet our narrator, Detective Constable Aidan Waits in a brief, prologue that serves as a framing device for his reminiscences about the previous November. “I couldn’t have explained the girls, the women, who had briefly entered my life. Briefly changed it.”

Waits is an anti-hero of sorts – damaged by a childhood in care, disgraced and suspended for stealing drugs from evidence lockers, he’s given one last shot at redemption and sent undercover on a suicide mission to feed information to drugs kingpin Zain Carver, so the force can flush out a mole. He eases himself into the role, hanging out at Carver’s seedy bars in Manchester, high on speed, but when a high-profile MP asks him to keep an eye on his teenage daughter Isabelle, who he meets at Carver’s notorious parties, things start taking a more sinister turn. Posh kids start dying from bad drugs – and signs point to the resurgence of the Burnsiders, who could have killed Carver’s old flame 10 years before.

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The ‘sirens’ Waits is drawn to aren’t fleshed out nearly enough, compared to the huge cast of men, and serve as little more than expendable gangster’s molls, but it’s a cleverly plotted and convincing read.#

Doubleday, priced £12.99

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