No More Heroes

January 25, 2010
Cal Innes matches wits (and fists) with a nasty bunch of neo-Nazis in British author Banks’s solid third novel featuring the down-on-his-luck Manchester PI (after Sucker Punch
). When one of slum lord Donald Plummer’s properties gets torched, Cal, who evicts families who can’t pay the rent for Plummer, risks his life to save a child trapped inside. This heroic act brings both Cal and Plummer unwanted media attention. When Plummer receives an anonymous threat on his remaining buildings, he suspects the English National Socialists, who are up in arms because Plummer rents to immigrants. Cal, who reluctantly agrees—for a hefty fee—to look into the group, soon discovers that the ENS may not be the only instigators. Angry student demonstrators stir up the already volatile situation by protesting Plummer’s unfair leasing practices. Prone to popping pills and knocking heads, Cal is a rough-and-tumble but strangely empathetic hero.

November 1, 2009
A Manchester tough guy learns that no good deed goes unpunished.

Ex-convict Cal Innes, a sometime private investigator, ekes out a living as the muscle for shady landlord Donald Plummer, who has a healthy disdain for the legal system. Plummer wants Cal to"accelerate" the eviction process for his many delinquent tenants. Comically complicating the job is Cal's sidekick, nicknamed Daft Frank because of a harebrained robbery scheme gone awry. Cal expects resistance, even physical opposition, from the tenants, but a locked apartment door with smoke billowing out from beneath abruptly vaults him into heroism; he rescues a reluctant little boy too terrified to talk before his rescuer passes out. Cal awakens to find himself the subject of a laudatory piece in the local newspaper. His reward for bravery is some public recognition and an additional assignment from Plummer: Find the arsonist who set the potentially fatal fire. The landlord even provides a long list of people who have it in for him. This new gig thrusts Cal into a more dangerous, though not unfamiliar, milieu as he and Frank go up against a potentially militant tenants-rights group and a faction of The English National Socialists (skinheads). The more he learns, the deeper into the muck he sinks.

Though the heavy vernacular and nonstop violence aren't for everyone, Cal's third rough-and-tumble first-person caper (Sucker Punch, 2009, etc.) should keep most readers rapidly turning pages till the solid plot builds to a payoff in late innings.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from February 1, 2010
Manchester PI Callum Innes ("Sucker Punch") takes on the job of finding the arsonist who set fire to a house where a woman died and he single-handedly rescued a child. He discovers that the English city he thinks he knows is home to neo-Nazis and urban terrorists, and he must face his own addiction to pain killers. VERDICT Banks is one of the freshest voices in hard-boiled crime fiction today. His protagonist talks to readers like an old friend, fills us in on the action, and lays everything out so well that we even feel his back pain, know his fear, and grow to appreciate his considerable charm. For fans of Lee Child and Michael Connelly who like the lone hero facing difficult situations.

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2010
There are PIs who feel fear, who take beatings, whose health is bad, who pop pills, drink, and smoke too muchand then there is Manchester, Englands Cal Innes. Innes, returned from his unsuccessful sojourn in L.A. (Sucker Punch, 2009), is doing evictions for a slumlord when a rental catches fire with two tenants still in it. Acting on instinct, Cal rescues a young Pakistani childthe boys grandmother diesand is labeled a hero by the press. The good publicity rejuvenates his sideline as an investigator, so he quits the slumlord, who immediately hires him back: more arsons are threatened, and an anti-immigrant group offers the logical suspects. The third entry in this strong series may be the best yet, as Cals investigation takes in white supremacists, student activists, and immigrants, all rushing headlong toward a fiery conflagration during a protest march on the so-called Curry Mile. In Cals noir-torn world, choosing sides is problematic, so he instead chooses problems, pursuing them with dogged intensity. (In a nod to The Maltese Falcon, Innes thinks, When someone beats the shit out of your partner, youre supposed to do something about it.) The real problem is, by not choosing sides, its easy to liveand diealone. Powerful stuff.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)