Saturday's Child by Ray Banks

Cal Innes is a hardboiled ex-con caught up in the search for a mobster's missing daughter. Leaving no cliché unturned, Ray Banks drags his ill-defined cast through a Northern England of incest, alcoholism, drug abuse and casual violence towards an unsatisfying conclusion.

Attempting the taut prose of Chandler or Spillane, Banks mangles working class patter into short sentences and garish similes, never capturing the authentic voices of his unpleasant and ignorant narrators. The protagonist Innes comes across as a moron, emotionally needy and ill-suited to his role as Private Investigator - his sudden rampage across Newcastle is jarringly out of character; his antagonist Mo is little more than a stereotyped thug. Female characters are, inevitably, defined by their sexuality. The worth of men depends solely on their ability to hand out or receive beatings. Dialogue is stilted, and the plot stumbles along driven by obvious surprises.

Ironically, there is nothing shocking about the violence: it is described with a glib realism that has been done before, and better. The descriptive passages are ponderous, characters lack interior lives and fail to learn from mistakes. If this suggests some purpose to Saturday's Child, the unsympathetic lead and mediocre storytelling render it impotent.