A review by blevins
He Kills Coppers by Jake Arnott

3.0

Books [and movies] have sort of taken the back seat for the past 2/3 weeks. Moving across country can do that to your attention span [too anxious to read for any great length of time] or energy [too worn out at night to read for any great length of time]. So, my 2011 total has kind of taken a dive the past month. HE KILLS COPPERS by Jake Arnott is a British crime novel set mostly in the 1960s/1970s [with a dash of 1985 at the end] and tells the stories of three individuals--a cop killing criminal, a cop who attempts to catch him and the sleazy reporter who writes about the case in the lurid purple prose of his newspaper. No nonsense writing from Arnott that I appreciate. It's always interesting to see how really sparse writing style works perfectly with hard-boiled crime fiction. Flowery prose just would feel so completely wrong in a story like HE KILLS COPPERS. The book goes off the rails every now and then, mostly due to Arnott wanting to set up the era or expand on something from that particular time and place. Also, every time it jumps forward in time, it takes a bit before the story catches back up to the characters.