Reviewer: Gillian Hamer, author of The Charter, Closure, Complicit and Crimson Shore (www.gillianhamer.com)
What we thought: I should start this review by saying that I’ve never read a Peter May novel that I didn’t fall in love with. The Lewis Trilogy was wonderful, and Entry Island totally captivating. So, it’s no surprise if I tell you that Runaway was another top class novel.
Split between two storylines / two contrasting runaway journeys. 1965 and a group of Glasgow lads, who call themselves ‘The Shuffle’, run away to London with their band to find fame and fortune. Inspired by new group The Beatles, they feel sure London will present them with every opportunity that their home city failed to deliver.
Switch now to 2015 and the same group of now elderly men find themselves repeating the trip – but this time for very different reasons – with a very different end goal.
Each journey is eventful and entertaining in its own right. May handles the split time frame to perfection. He brings London’s Sixties’ music scene to life in vivid technicolour, and also manages to raise a multitude of social issues in his writing, not least societies view, and treatment of, the elderly.
Told mainly through the eyes of band guitarist, Jack, Runaway is a crime novel covering fifty years of friendships and shattered dreams, set against the backdrop of two unique and contrasting cities at two unique and contrasting periods of recent history.
And it has an edge of the seat twist that reminds you what a talented author Peter May is. If you don’t end this novel with a lump in your throat or a tear in your eye, go read 50 Shades of Something.
You’ll enjoy this if you like: Ann Cleeves, Peter Robinson, Ian Rankin.
Avoid if you don’t like: Glasgow, London, Swinging Sixties, Crime fiction.
Ideal accompaniments: Greasy-spoon full English breakfast and cheap lager.
Genre: Crime Fiction.
Available from Amazon
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