âSWEEPERâ BY STEVE BRUCE: A REVIEW
"I looked around the stadium and sighed. Football is a business, and a tough one at that, but the green playing area, well, that really is the field of dreamsâ â Steve Barnes, âSweeperâ.
Please note the below touches on major plot spoilers. For an additional helping into the madness, you can find a live-tweet of my first read through the novel, featuring a few more quotes and pics, starting here.
There are few figures within English football as universally loved as Steve Bruce, with his soft, Geordie burr, and his sleepy smile. Who wouldnât love a man who so closely resembles a portly cartoon admiral from a car insurance ad? And who can resist smiling fondly at that nose, all squat and squished like a coughed-up croissant, broken so many times that it boasts all the defined angles of an oven glove?
My own love for Steve Bruce deepened last year when I bought and reviewed the first of his three mystery novels. If youâve missed coverage of Bruceâs glorious career as a mystery writer, let me get you up to speed.
In what appears to have been an ambitiously short space of time between 1999 and 2000, the literary titan wrote three thrilling novels, and published them just as briskly. Weâre not sure why he did this, but we do know that he gets a bit sheepish when itâs brought up in interviews, and the exact details of the arrangement he had with Paragon Press Publishing are far from common knowledge. There are even rumours he didnât actually write the books himself, but I refuse to believe such hearsay.
Anyway, after some gnashing and wailing following the sequelâs meteoric surge in price, (from ÂŁ70 to over ÂŁ250) a mysterious fellow Bruce fan sent me the second novel, Sweeper, in exchange for my copy of the first. The result is the review that lies before you. Sit back, unwind, and let me escort you through Bruceâs second volume, a warren of intrigue featuring Yugoslavian warlords, lesbian prostitutes, Nazi-hunting spies and much, much more besidesâŚ
Read more: http://thesetpieces.com/features/sweeper-steve-bruce-review/#ixzz4MEKfm4ZD