read by Paul Thornley
Refreshingly outré, A
Private Business is peopled by an intriguingly unfashionable and
unglamorous collection of punters, villains and investigators. Private
detective Lee Arnold and his assistant Mumtaz Hakim tackle a selection of London villains
in a manner that seems at first to be as much satire as social commentary. And
it works magnificently.
It is 2012 and East London is undergoing a major tarting up
courtesy of the approaching Olympic games. Hidden strategically from the
ostentatious Olympic Park are the meanest of mean streets – streets of crime,
bereft of hope or optimism: a community destroyed
by conflict and tension.
Arnold’s client is a celebrity horror show: an aging, spent,
female stand-up comedian whose claim to fame, way back, was all the sexism and
racism that she could get away with. It made her astoundingly rich and by the
same token extraordinarily hated. Now a widow, she has joined a local church that
has a highly dubious history and she is convinced that someone is entering her
house and messing with her things: that she is being stalked.
It is a bumpy ride: bare and brutal – at times verging on
the genuinely hysterical.
Ultimately, it is very bleak and very sad.
And Arnold and Hakim are a very welcome new duo to the
crime-fighting genre.
* * * *
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