Book review: Stolen Souls

By Tom Adair
Published on Sunday 22 January 2012 03:41

STOLEN Souls is a fabulous exercise in breath control. One gulp, so deep and fathomless, released softly over 300 torso-tense pages, a slow, continuous exhalation, rank, and hissing with tension and menace –and just one notable surprise – as Stuart Neville releases the final, cool whisper of deliverance to his tale of serial slaughter.

His policeman hero, Jack Lennon, reads a small thank- you note from abroad. The note exhorts Lennon to be kind to his daughter Ellen and lover Susan, the sole objects of affection in an otherwise heartless, loose-ended, dead-ended parable of Belfast, a graveyard of dreams.

It’s a modern horror tale of the trafficking of waifs and strays into desperate prostitution, of turf wars and gangland crime, of ex-paramilitaries devouring each other’s ambitions, abetted by a gang of Lithuanian thugs, led by coke-head Arturas Strazdas, whose brother Tomas dies on the novel’s opening page at the hand of Gayla, a Ukranian symbol of innocence and hope.

Soon the novel becomes a stir-fry of death and addiction, of hideaways and car chases, into which Neville drips the mess of Lennon’s horrific domestic past and Ellen’s nightmares.

Toss in a bad cop or two, a mean lawyer, a cruel east European madam, and the evil, relentless presence of the Strazdas brothers’ mother, and the poisonous stir-fry becomes a potion in constant motion. It moves so fast you barely notice when credibility is stretched. Neville peppers his prose with details – street names, weapons knowledge, the modus operandi of cops and criminals – sounding streetwise without betraying a whiff of research.

Stolen Souls leaves enough loose ends for a couple of follow-ups, and one hopes that Lennon’s love life might be allowed more air to breathe. A pent-up hero makes it hard for the reader to care, beyond admiring the sheer bravado and accomplishment of the prose as it sends him hurtling towards bestsellerland.

• Stolen Souls by Stuart Neville, Harvill Secker, £12.99

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