Could it be the end for Sharman?
For seven years, ex-cop Nick Sharman has lived in 'exile' on a Caribbean island with no UK extradition treaty - his life of luxury funded by the proceeds of a bank robbery where he was the last man standing. Then a phone call out of the blue from London changes everything. The voice from the past belongs to the only woman that he loves, his daughter Judith. Like father, like daughter, she's a police officer, but the family resemblance doesn't stop there - Judith is in big trouble with the law, and has no one to turn to except her father.
Returning under an assumed name to a bleak mid-winter England, Nick finds things have changed, and so has he. He´s grown older, but perhaps no wiser and finds his once beloved London moving too fast for him. Vowing to clear his daughter's name by any means necessary, Sharman finds himself enmeshed with blackmailers, murderers, the security services, and Russian gangsters all baying for his blood – until he, Judith, and his old sparring partner Jack Robber, take on all-comers in a dramatic finale on the mean streets of the capital.
'Timlin has lost none of his skills for portraying the mood and dialogue of the city's underbelly'
- Marcel Berlins, The Times [read the full review]
Mark Timlin, who was once such a dominant force in the land of London noir, has not been writing-at any rate under his own name-for many years. His return in Stay Another Day (No Exit £18.99) is welcome, and it turns out the reason for his absence was that his main character, the ex-cop turned dodgy private eye Nick Sharman, had been living on a Caribbean island to avoid being charged with a bank robbery in England. Sharman's police woman daughter has been arrested suspected of killing one of her informants. He slips back into London to help her prove her innocence, but finds that the criminal milieu is much changed. Timlin has lost none of his skills for portraying the mood and dialogue of the city's underbelly.
Marcel Berlins, The Times
'It is possible that South London contains some law abiding citizens in conventional relationships but they make no appearance in Timlin's immoral, wildly enjoyable books '
- The Times
'Full of cars, girls, guns, strung out along the high sierras of Brixton and Battersea, the Elephant and the North Peckham Estate, all those jewels in the crown they call Sarf London '
- Arena
'The king of the British hard-boiled thriller'
- The Times
'Nick Sharman is like black coffee at 4 o’clock in the morning: very black, very bitter'
- Derek Raymond
'A pure pulp vision closer to Spillane than Chandler. The Sharman books are bloody romances of the South London badlands'
- John Williams