Jonny Lambert's Bear and Bird: Make Friends

'A well-paced, ambitious crime novel, handled with sensitivity'

Independent

'Ambitious and, in terms of British crime writing, original. It escapes the leaden plotting and ingratiating rhetoric of much hard-case literature'

The Times Literary Supplement

'Like Ian Rankin, he readily combines bleakness with extraordinary compassion; like Elmore Leonard and Raymond Chandler, he operates in a world where justice is not always the province of the law; and, like James Ellroy, he can endow the most extreme acts of retribution with poetic resonance. Yet the voice is absolutely his own'

New Statesman

'Jimmy Mack . . . is the eloquent narrator of Gareth Creer's third novel and, to a familiar story of big money, death and deception, he brings a strange poetry . . . this is a curious novel, and perhaps rare for the genre in its sensitivity, merging as it does the romanticism of crime with a wonder for the world about us'

James Hopkin, The Times

'Amid the devilish plot twists Creer makes room to flesh out his principals most satisfyingly, and establish a page-blurring pace which he underpins with a unique and oddly lush economy of language'

Chris Power, The Times

'In spite of its savage background, Creer's novel is rumbustiously entertaining . . . partly because Jimmy is an engaging and strangely innocent hero, and partly because of Creer's heady, Burgess-meets-Berkoff prose'

Ross Gilfillan, Daily Mail

'Creer's sensitive and poised writing lifts the novel into a class of its own, closer to vintage Martin Amis than Rancid Aluminum . . . exquisitely raw in tone, with a sparse and timeless beauty'

Manchester Evening News