Bill James: Naked at the Window

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Detective Chief Inspector Colin Harpur and Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles continue to battle it out against the drug gangs on their unnamed West Country city patch, while working with the drug gangs and battling it out with each other.

Naked at the Window opens with the wonderfully named villain and sometime grass, Panicking Ralph, contemplating whether the situation he is facing - three mutilated bodies - is about to bring on one of his famous panics. He knows all three well, they were his drug suppliers.

But this is not about to cause the lake-like sweating, the belief that the old scar on his face has opened and is now oozing ghastly rotten fluids. Because all Panicking Ralph can think when faced with the bodies is where he will now get drugs to distribute.

As entertaining and as deluded as Ralphy is, he is mere fool to James' main players: Harpur and the possibly truly insane Iles. Although James is an expert plotter, you read his books for these two characters.

The true tension lies in their twisted relationship. They hate each other, and with reason. Harpur has had Iles' wife. Iles is keen to have Harpur's underage daughter in return, and for revenge.

You also read James for the writing. This is grandly ornate, at turns, and brutally nasty at others. The characters speak some other language: oddly archaic yet colloquial; intensely comic yet sternly old-fashioned. God knows how he does it, but James is the genius of the genre.

Constable

$67.95