Flesh Wounds (Inspector Troy Series)

by John Lawton

Overview

Praised for their riveting, ingenious plot twists, John Lawton's series of espionage thrillers featuring Chief Inspector Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard have an uncanny ability to place readers in the thick of history. Now in Flesh Wounds, an old flame has returned to Troy's life: Kitty Stilton, wife of an American presidential hopeful. Private eye Joey Rork has been hired to make sure Kitty's amorous liaisons with a rat pack crooner don't ruin her husband's political career. But he also wants to know why Kitty has been spotted with Danny Ryan, whose twin brothers, in addition to owning one of London's hottest jazz clubs, are said to have inherited the crime empire of fallen mobster Alf Marx. Before Rork can find out, he meets a gruesome end. And he isn't the only one: bodies have started turning up around London, dismembered in the same bizarre and horrifying way. Is it possible that the blood trail leads back to Troy's own police force and into Troy's own forgotten past? Flesh Wounds, a compulsively readable thriller, finds one of our most able storytellers at the height of his game.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802142306
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	02/09/2006
Series:	Inspector Troy Series , #5
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

John Lawton is a descendant of an IrishAmerican family that settled in Britain early in the twentieth century. He has spent much of his adult life rediscovering his lost continent and interpreting it for British television, but is now fairly content to let time and chance bounce him between a hilltop house in the English Pennines and a Manhattan apartment with frequent forays into the Chiricahua Mountains.

Editorial Reviews

Flesh Wounds is an odd mix of sex romp and shoot-'em-up, but it worked for me because Lawton writes with such style, intelligence, irreverence, political sophistication and keen understanding of the strengths, weaknesses and glorious eccentricities of his fellow Brits.
— The Washington Post

Patrick Anderson

Personal dysfunction complicates the investigation of a local crime family. The impending retirement of his superior Brock and a visit home to his frail mother lead fortysomething DCI Frederick Troy to contemplate his future. A Soviet native who emigrated to England as a child and worked in WWII as a spy, Troy still winces when he recalls getting shot by his titled mistress in 1944, and his rocky relationship with his controlling, promiscuous twin sisters Sasha and Masha. When a bomb in Brock's car kills him and sends Troy to the hospital, Foxx, his much younger girlfriend, urges him to quit Scotland Yard, then leaves him after he refuses. But he doesn't want long for female companionship. His old flame Kitty reenters his life; when Masha tearfully confesses that her husband is sleeping with Anna, another of Troy's exes, he allows his sister to seduce him; and he takes up again briefly with Anna. Confronting an American detective who's shadowing him, Troy learns that Rork's been hired to follow the wife of American presidential hopeful Cal Cormack-who happens to be Kitty-and keep tabs on her affair with crooner Vince Christy, a favorite of Danny Ryan, who controls a growing share of London's protection racket. Rork's violent death leads Troy to the dangerous Ryans. The overstuffed plot is anchored by Troy's fundamental decency-bruised and jaded, he's still an improbable romantic-and by smart, brittle prose from Lawton (Bluffing Mr. Churchill, 2004, etc.).

Kirkus Reviews