No Precious Truth (A Cathy Marsden Thriller)
No Precious Truth is the first in a new crime thriller series by author Chris Nickson, set in Leeds in 1941, where twenty-something Sergeant Cathy Marsden, a six-year veteran of the Leeds police force, is seconded to the Special Investigation Branch (SIB) headed by Military Police Sergeant Faulkner. She takes to the work easily as Faulkner and his team track a local racketeer and deserter who has his fingers in every crime-filled pie. Cathy is as surprised as everyone else when her brother, who she thought had an office Civil Service job in London, joins the team from MI5 Department XX. The new SIB assignment is to hunt down a treacherous spy who escaped from detention and is known to be headed for Leeds. When the team discover the spy has got his hands on explosives and that his contact is their local racketeer, finding him is imperative, but problematic. Cathy must use all her wits and street resources to keep one step ahead.
This new series is in a similar vein to the Tom Harper novels which feature a DI in Leeds between 1890 and 1920. Cathy, despite her young age, is respected for her thorough familiarity with Leeds, a city with which Nickson has a loving relationship that shines through his writing. WWII forms the broad backdrop where present-day crime is all about espionage, subterfuge, petrol and food coupon theft, and forgery, but Nickson pops in small reminders that the routines and dangers of war are clear and present for the average person on the street, too – fire watch duty, food shortages, Anderson shelters, Luftwaffe bombings. Appropriately, the epilogue takes place on March 14, 1941, the night of the Leeds Blitz, the worst bombing in the city’s history.
