Stone Cold Trouble by Amer Anwar

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought Of It: 

Some time has passed since the events of Amer Anwar’s debut novel, Brothers in Blood, and the villains that Zaq and Jags managed to get set down are banged up in jail. But the two friends are about to walk straight back into trouble.

In the middle of the night, Zaq gets a call to say his brother has been beaten unconscious by a gang of thugs who may or may not have been acting on the orders of the now-jailed kingpin. And though Zaq knows his not-quite-yet girlfriend Nina is right to tell him to leave it to the police to deal with the assailants, he cannot let it lie.

And then if that wasn’t trouble enough, Jags’ uncle asks the boys to help him retrieve a family heirloom he recklessly used as a marker in a high-stakes card game.

Once again, we are taken on a journey through the murkier side of West London, moving between the hand-to-mouth existence of the gig economy, and the wealth that resides a short drive away amongst the greenery of the home counties. A world where the police are rarely trusted and where jealousy, honour and revenge are matters to be taken into your own hands.

There are lines that Zaq and Jags would never cross – but can the same be said of everyone else?

When I reviewed Brothers in Blood, I said that I thought he had reinvented the amateur detective genre from Crime Fiction’s so-called Golden Age. On the face of it, Stone Cold Trouble is a thousand miles from the novels of Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers – but think of the way that Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey moves seamlessly through upper-crust society, or Miss Jane Marple through village life in middle England, in a way that the police can never emulate. And that is what Zaq and Jags can do through the close-knit Asian communities of West London.

There is plenty of violence here, but it is the violence of hand-to-hand fighting. – and in the sequences where Zaq sits in vigil by his brother’s bedside, Anwar doesn’t shirk from showing the consequences of violence. He never glorifies it.

The relationship between Zaq and Jags still bubbles with humour and the story grips from beginning to end.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: A.A. Dhand, Dreda Say Mitchell

Avoid If You Dislike: Blow by blow descriptions of fights

Perfect Accompaniment: Desi scrambled eggs and chai

Genre: Crime Fiction

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