I’ve been looking for books set in Newcastle for years without much success. It’s typical that a crime novel set here comes to my notice just as I’m about to leave the city.

I’m not sure whether the rest of this series is set in the north east but on the basis of this book I’ll be having a read to find out. This is dark, dark stuff but it suits the town. Whether I would have found this book as enjoyable if I didn’t know many of the locations is debatable. I certainly enjoyed knowing that the Heartbreak Soup, Francesca’s, the Baltic Tavern etc are all real places. There were a few fictional places muddled in to and I suspect the seams would have been invisible if I didn’t know the real places (well actually I’m not sure where the seams were myself, some of the places I thought of as fictional could easily be real but off my radar).

On the whole this was a read that I enjoyed for different reasons than usual and I think I’d be more critical of the plot if I hadn’t have been so tied up in the setting.