Soho Dead

Kenny Gabriel is an alcoholic who is pushing sixty with forty-five quid to his name. His best friend has died, his favorite bar is closing, and he sponges off his brother. He makes a spotty living investigating skip-traces for an obese, chiseling agoraphobic. He is not exactly the ideal lead character for a mystery.

Kenny is brought in to investigate the disappearance of the daughter of an old employer, Frank Parr. Kenny had worked for Frank's bar in Soho forty years before. Along with owning a bar Frank had a side-business of pornography, which he had parlayed into a publishing empire. Now, Frank is about to purchase one of the leading newspapers in London, and he wants his old employee, now a skip-tracer, to do a quiet job.

Author Greg Keen does a terrific job of laying out the clues, following Kenny through the investigation, misdirecting Kenny when necessary, and, yet, providing a logical and satisfying conclusion. I liked Keen's descriptions of Soho and London; Kenny remembers the old squalid, run down Soho before it started to gentrify, and he obviously preferred that Soho, when he was young and life was an adventure.

Keen also does a solid job of bringing to life his criminal and quasi-criminal characters. Frank Parr is a businessman, but a businessman from old Soho, which meant that he was on the shady side of the law. I really enjoyed Parr's chauffeur, Farrelly, a tough bastard with a marvelous way of conjugating the nouns “cnt” and “cck.” I foresee that we will see Farrelly in future installments.

This story was a self-contained story. There are some loose threads, e.g., will he go to Manchester? (I assume not, since the future installments are entitled “the Soho Series.”)