Five Days Of Fog

Anna Freeman W&N €18.10 Seventeen-year-old Florrie is in love with her cousin Ted. He’s a good lad – but she’s a bad girl, a member of the vicious all-female crime gang led by her mother, Ruby. Now that Ruby is getting out of prison, Florrie hopes to make a fresh start with her blessing, but betrayals within the gang threaten more than just her plans. Freeman is excellent on the grim and violent realities of a life of crime and the queasy moral choices that its followers make. Her gripping novel is suffused with an atmosphere of menace as thick as the London smog of 1952 in which it is set. Neil Armstrong