Paper Soldiers by Mark Pettinger #damppebblesblogtours

Thanks to author Mark Pettinger and Emma Welton of damppebblesblogtours for a copy of Paper Soldiers in exchange for an honest review.

Paper Soldiers by Mark Pettinger

My thoughts

Paper Soldiers opens with a standard mystery scene: a person walking her dog finds a dead body. (Or rather, the dog sniffs the corpse and the person’s dragged into the crime scene whether she wants to be or not.) It’s a slower beginning with a rather self-absorbed, uninteresting character.

Fortunately, once DCI Jonny Priest and his team arrive on the scene, Boring Woman with a Dog disappears back to her boring-ish life, and the much more colorful investigative team takes her place at the spectacle of the dead body.

It is a spectacle, make no doubt about that. A man has been crucified on a tree. Crucifixion, as the medical examiner informs them, is a painful and slow way to die. Even after several days, the victim dies from suffocation rather than exsanguination (massive blood loss). If that doesn’t make sense, don’t worry: the good doctor tells Priest and his team members exactly why and how the suffocation happens. Gruesome.

Characters

Priest and his team are an assorted bunch of characters. I really liked their camaraderie! They seem to know how to work well together, rather than being rivals or divided into factions as is often the case in police procedurals.

DCI Jonny Priest has a rough background, but he seems to have found some peace with his partner Nic (Nicola) Stephens. He has a sarcastic, sometimes blistering, wit, and unusually for a fictional DCI, seems to treat his team members like his equals in many ways. (Mutual teasing, for example.) Did I find him sympathetic? I’m not sure. Does that matter? Nope! I can still root for unsympathetic characters who do good things, and here, I definitely wanted Priest to kick the bad guys right off the page.

As Pettinger describes the drug trade in Manchester and the rival gangs angling for power, I got the sense that he did a lot of research into this topic.

The dynamics of the gang rivalries are fascinating. Rather than the traditional gang hierarchies, the Yardies have a relatively fluid power structure. With the death of Jarel Powell, their head, they are in turmoil. But Pettinger focuses more on their rival gang, the Dolsen family. This is a good decision, I think, because otherwise there would have been too many people in an already-crowded cast of characters.

It was interesting to read from the antagonists’ point of view as they transport their goods into and around the area. The Dolsens must plan so many different aspects of their business: torching vehicles, bribing guards, thwarting the attention of the authorities. It’s all things that I, in my blissfully (or self-righteously) innocence have never had to consider.

And despite the potential for a more lucrative income than fiction-writing will ever provide, I think I’ll stick with abiding by the law, thank you! It seems less stressful, not to mention less likely to end in an untimely demise. Which brings me to an important point . . .

Violence

The crucifixion isn’t the only graphic violence in this book. This is not a book for the squeamish or overly sensitive. This is where the book definitely leans toward crime genre rather than police procedural: the crime genre in general seems to tolerate a higher level of explicit violence than many other genres.

There was one chapter when a group of characters tortured other characters. Without giving spoilers, I’ll say this: it was gruesome, graphic, and detailed. As the torture methods grew increasingly painful and stretched on for an agonizingly long time, I had to skip to the next chapter. I felt physically pained and couldn’t bear to read it any longer.

This was a huge negative point for me. I appreciate that Pettinger doesn’t flinch from describing evil, but the detailed step-by-step torture method descriptions felt excessive. Not everyone can handle this; personally, I would prefer to focus on the police investigation rather than the antagonists.

However, and this is an important point, I was thankful that the graphic violence does not extend to sexual violence and/or rape. Honestly, that was a relief!

the DCI Priest series

This is book three in the DCI Priest series. It works as a standalone, though I was a bit confused about who was whom in the beginning. (This was especially true of the series regulars, the police.)

The characters are often referred to by their last names in the narration but their first names in dialogue. It would’ve helped if we were told both their first and last names when they first appear in the book. Otherwise, I was able to follow along okay. It’s not a huge issue. There are no spoilers for the previous two series titles, either.

Speaking of which . . .

If you’re interested, the previous two titles of the DCI Priest series are available on Amazon: The Decalogue and Tick Tock Time’s Up.

As always, not every book is a great fit for every reader. So even if I found the violence to be too much for me, others may disagree. If you like crime and/or police procedurals and can handle graphic violence, then you may enjoy Paper Soldiers. Be sure to check out all the reviews from the damppebbles tour!

Pettinger is a crime fiction writer of the DCI Priest novels. His debut The Decalogue entered the Amazon Bestseller Top 100 list in December 2015, and the Top 10 on the sub-genre of ‘police procedurals’.

Mark was born in a maternity ward attached to RAF Manston in Kent. His father was in the Royal Air Force, and for the first few years of his life, he lived on a number of RAF bases on the east coast of the UK with his parents and sister. Skip forward a few years; now married and with children he lives in a small village in East Yorkshire.

Fitting his writing around his ‘day job’; Mark’s writing pattern is somewhat sporadic, and he writes when he can, which currently is in hotel rooms / foyer, or in an airport lounge trying to keep one eye on the departure board to ensure he doesn’t miss his flight!

Mark’s interest in the murky world of crime started a number of years ago when he was attracted to reading true crime. He became fascinated with the exploits of the Yorkshire Ripper, Dennis Nilsen, John Wayne Gacy, Andrei Chikatilo etc. An avid reader of many genre’s, but his attention turned to favouring crime fiction; and his reading list includes Ian Rankin, Mark Billingham, Lynda La Plante, Jo Nesbo, and latterly CJ Tudor (for something just that little bit special).

Mark has openly credited Ian Rankin as the primary inspiration for not only stirring his interest in reading crime fiction, but also ‘picking up the pen’.

Mark has published two hugely successful crime fiction novels: The Decalogue in 2012, and Tick Tock, Time’s Up in 2015. Long overdue, critics have noted, Mark published the third instalment in the DCI Priest series Paper Soldiers in March 2020.

Next on his list is a standalone crime thriller, due for publication in summer 2021.

Purchase Links:

Amazon UK: amazon.co.uk

Amazon US: amazon.com

If you’re looking for more books like this, check out my post about some new police procedurals Spring 2020.