Jake Kerridge

NIGHTCRAWLING by Leila Mottley

288pp, Bloomsbury Circus, £16.99, ebook £7.97

★★★★ ☆

The 20-year-old Leila Mottley’s debut novel fictionalises a scandal that rocked her hometown of Oakland, California, in 2015: the suicide of a police officer who revealed in his note that he and several colleagues had been routinely using and abusing an underage sex worker. The book is partly concerned with the question of who will police the police, but most interested in demonstrating how a teenage girl might find herself in such straits that colluding with bestial cops in her own degradation starts to seem like a sensible life-choice.

It begins with a grim account of the narrator, 17-year-old Kiara, fruitlessly seeking work to support herself and her brother while he’s chasing the will-o’-the-wisp of a rap career. When she finds herself in loco parentis for an erratic neighbour’s little boy, her only way of making ends meet is to hit the streets.

Camila, a transsexual prostitute who takes Kiara under her wing, lends the book some relieving glamour, but it’s the soul-crushing reality of Kiara’s arrangement with the local cops that stays with you. “The difference between the cops and street men is that the cops like to make it a game. They [watch] me, salivating, trying to figure out how to make me just scared enough that the fear swallows me and leaves a body worth getting on top of.” Mottley does a fine job of conveying the seaminess of this milieu without being prurient. There isn’t a great deal of moral ambiguity – Kiara is as virtuous and put-upon as any heroine in Dickens. But she is always a lively presence on the page even at her most downtrodden, thanks to her expressive narrative voice. Sometimes, Mottley’s poetic similes don’t hit the mark, but the risks she takes generally pay off so well that one finishes the book grumbling: nobody who has just turned 20 has any business writing this well.