Hawthorn & Child by Keith Ridgway

It begins with a shooting in North London, with detectives Hawthorn and Child trying to work out what’s happened. Early on, though, Ridgway derails the standard train of plot in which much detective fiction gets locked: he lets the priority of solving the crime dissolve and dissipate. "We are not at the centre of things," says Child. Then the chapters all run in different but related directions, picking up the story arcs of people whose relevance to Hawthorn and Child is not always immediately apparent.

So we slide through the worlds of the chief inspector's daughter, the local crime boss's driver, a semi-psychopathic editor and the blurring dream-visions of Hawthorn's sexual fantasies. Thus Ridgway breaks the conceit of a central narrative thread, and the characters that it might have held together go rattling away in all directions, knocking into one another like scattering beads. As one of them says: "It’s not a plot. Nothing so straightforward as a plot." It is excellent, though, whatever it is that Ridgway has put in place of a traditional plot. This is not fussy stylistic trickery: the whole thing holds together and is buoyant with grotesque, shit-smeared brilliance. [Galen O'Hanlon]