In Bruen’s new pulp-inspired novel featuring Inspector Brant, the Southeast London Police Squad is plagued by a serial murderer who’s determined to give his victims a lesson in manners.

Taking a cue from Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, the Manners Killer believes that anyone who behaves rudely in public (e.g., verbally abuses a store clerk, slaps a child) is fair game. He soon finds that he’s no match for Brant, Bruen’s amoral, sociopathic brute of a detective (“He was heavily built with a black Irish face that wasn’t so much lived in as squatted upon”).

While he might or might not agree with the killer’s cause and can even forgive his tactics to some degree, Brant is just ornery enough to employ his trademark brand of amoral, borderline-criminal policing to hunt for the Manners Killer. For if there’s one thing that drives the incomparable inspector, it’s the unshakeable conviction that if anyone is going to be getting away with murder on his patch, it’ll be Brant himself. While his methods may be questionable, Brant gets results, and we find ourselves secretly cheering him on.

Meanwhile, Brant is writing his first crime novel, Calibre, and aspires to become the English Joseph Wambaugh. Of course, he doesn’t let the fact that he can’t write deter him; Brant just nicks the stories from his cop buddy Porter Nash…

Published editions: USA/Canada: St. Martin’s Minotaur;
France: Gallimard Série Noire.
Rights available: Romanian, Albanian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Macedonian, Moldavian, Montenegrin, Serbian, and Slovenian.