FIRST THOUGHTS

Snow Hill

LONDON, 1936, and rising crime reporter John Steadman receives a tip-off about a murdered policeman, yet the police deny one of their number is even missing. Undeterred, Steadman unearths a potential witness, but he winds up hanging from a meat hook. Steadman, locked in with the corpse by the killer is slowly freezing to death when rescued. Following a second attempt on his life which leaves two others dead, Steadman fakes his own death, going deep undercover in London’s underbelly, into the world of gay prostitution to unravel a scandalous blackmail operation somehow connected to the brutal killer.

Sanderson’s 2002 memoir, Wrong Rooms, attracted rave reviews but his move into fiction isn’t entirely without blemish. The flow of an intriguing plot line based on events rumoured to be true is often arrested by great indigestible gobbets of background information, while the characters are rather one-dimensional.