The Faithless

If you like your thrillers straight up, bloody and uncomplicated - and who doesn't? - then this is the book for you.
I can't recall the last time I read a novel with one hundred and sixty-two chapters (plus an epilogue) so quickly and with such a need to know what happens next and to whom!
THE PLOT: Over 453 pages (yep, some chapters are very short) Cole drops us into the seamy pit of East London gangsters and then pummels us with dirty deeds involving machetes and sundry other tools. This ripping (and chopping and carving) tale centres on arch bitch Cynthia Tailor, a woman with a heart as cold as Jack Frost's butt and an ambition bordering on the psychotic. She makes her name among the mobsters by killing - in self defence - one of the top gangsters. This makes her attractive to the new gangster number one and she becomes his mistress - an affair to leads ultimately to dire consequences.
This is a rough and bloody and gripping story. But despite featuring two utterly grisly executions, The Faithless also has some very funny and gripping dialogue from a crime writer at the top of her game.
Martina Cole is the Queen of Crime Fiction. Her books are the most borrowed from prison libraries in the UK and the most nicked from British shops. This is not surprising as not only is her prose vivid and punchy but the dialogue is very real. Or so I'm told.
Cole writes of the badlands of Essex and the means streets of London's East End. She knows whereof she writes. She was born in a council Estate in Essex, her first ever boyfriend was a bankrobber (they stayed in touch for 15 years while he was banged up) and she was mates with legendary '60s gangster Eddie Richardson.
But Cole's family are Irish and Catholic with her mother from Dublin, her father from Cork and a granny who used to tell them bedtime stories about Fionn MacCumhaill and other Irish legends.
Cole is also a TV producer and has helped to put some of her best-sellers onto the small screen including The Take and Runaway. And she has no time for literary snobs. She told me about attending a writer's conference a few years backa nd being approached by a posh authoress. "She said to me, 'Martina I wouldn't want the people who read your books to read my books. ' And I said: 'Well they won't because my readers like a good story! '"