Old Bakery Books.co.uk

ANGELS PASSING is a massive, Dickensian trawl through the depths of life in Portsmouth. With a compactly labyrinthine plot, uniquely human policemen, a grotesque rogues' gallery of squalid villains and a shadowy child as its anti-hero, it is easily the best novel that Graham Hurley has ever written.

Focussed around two investigations - the hunt for a ten year-old boy who may be linked to the death of a teenage girl, and a murder enquiry prompted by the discovery of the body of a small-time crook on wasteland north of the city - Hurley takes us to the core of his hero Joe Faraday's flawed relationships with both his girlfriend and his son. He also reveals more of D/C Winter's brutally effective take on the job and provides a grimly recognisable port-mortem report on a society that is coming apart at the seams.

This is at once an unremittingly realistic, fast-moving crime thriller and a bleakly compassionate novel about the price children are paying for a society that is in free fall.

Graham Hurley's Angels Passing is the third entry in this impressive series and presents an even bleaker view of Portsmouth than its predecessors - this is an inner city Britain in which children live almost as feral animals and in which the failed policies of prohibition leave the police and social services able to do little more than tinker at the margins of a society which seems to be rushing to its doom. With the grimness of its concerns and the liveliness of its writing, Hurley is in some ways a South Coast answer to Ian Rankin - before long, I suspect, he'll be just as famous."
- Mat Coward, London Morning Star.

Angels Passing is a realistic depiction of modern police work with no glamorous high-profile cases to attract the national press, just vicious criminals fighting each other and the police, and an underworld inhabited by drug-addicted teenagers. It's strong stuff and makes gripping, and at times grim reading.
- Susanna Yager, Sunday Telegraph.

Angels Passing is one of the best British crime novels that I have read in the past few years and Faraday looks like being an enduring character, more human than Rebus and also more interesting because we see less of him than the other members of the team. Portsmouth seems an unusual town in which to set a detective saga but the isolated nature of the town gives the novel a taut and claustrophobic feel that merely adds to the tension. An excellent police procedural.
- Waterstone’s Review

An ambitious police procedural epic set in the author’s home town of Portsmouth, this could well be the book that drags Graham Hurley into the rarefied atmosphere of crime bestsellerdom in the wake of Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. The third in the DI Joe Faraday series spans a momentous week in the life of the local major crimes squad, following the fall of a 14 year-old girl from the top of a tower block and the discovery of a shadowy figure captured on CCTV. The often sordid life of a large British city is caught with pinpoint accuracy, together with a host of realistic characters on both sides of the law. The picture of a society in freefall, littered with wrecked families, drugs and corruption, feels painfully true to life, and the conflicts facing the investigating policemen betray true emotion and pathos. Hurley was previously a TV documentary maker and his touch stays assured and analytical throughout. A splendid achievement.
- Maxim Jakubowski, The Guardian