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Nick Place

Författare till Roll With It

6 verk 62 medlemmar 7 recensioner

Om författaren

Foto taget av: Courtesy of Allen and Unwin

Verk av Nick Place

Roll With It (2013) 18 exemplar
Kazillion Wish (2003) 17 exemplar
The OK Team (2008) 13 exemplar
Thanks a kazillion (2004) 3 exemplar

Taggad

Allmänna fakta

Kön
male
Nationalitet
Australia
Land (för karta)
Australia

Medlemmar

Recensioner

This is the story of a Melbourne elite cop who is involved in a fatal shooting of a criminal in the middle of a crime. The politicians decide to make an example of him for the sake of the publicity and, in the meantime, while waiting for his case to come up, he is shuttled off to the side to become a bicycle cop.
While in this position, he comes in contact with some serious criminal activity and cannot get anyone to listen to him.
This is the first book by the author and shows promise. The "outsider cop" is done nicely and seeing him not fit into where he's been placed is also well done. I did think that the criminal element was a bit over the top.
On the whole, an enjoyable, light read.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
quiBee | 4 andra recensioner | Jan 21, 2016 |
An entertaining first novel from author Nick Place. After killing a suspect in a police stake out, Melbourne detective Tony Laver is demoted from major crime to the mountain bike squad where he is told to lie low and wait for the ensuing political row to die down.Instead of high level crime he now has to cope with aching thighs and over-earnest rookie cops while helping lost tourists and breaking up minor brawls. In the midst of this he latches onto two thugs who are giving him all the wrong signals. Laver's mates in the squad have been warned off and won't help him and with his personal life unravelling as well he becomes frustrated and starts to follow his own leads. Told with a wry humour involving several interesting characters including a hippy chick and a naive supermarket manager as well as the two inept thugs, this is a very enjoyable read.… (mer)
 
Flaggad
cscott | 4 andra recensioner | Jul 20, 2013 |
I couldn’t resist the premise of Roll With It, an Australian debut novel combining crime, action and humour. Author Nick Place introduces Major Crime Detective Tony ‘Rocket’ Laver who is plunged in the midst of a professional and personal crisis after shooting a suspect dead in self defense. As the sixth Victorian officer to do so in as many months, Laver becomes a political scapegoat and is swiftly reassigned to the Mobile Public Interaction Squad, forced to don a neon jacket and bike pants to patrol the streets of Melbourne on a mountain bike.

The intention of the Brass is to keep Laver out of the way and out of trouble but in between needling his earnest rookie partners, giving the wrong directions to backpackers and endless cups of coffee, his well tuned cop instincts finds something not quite right about two men menacing a hippie chick and her buttoned up admirer. Laver starts poking around convinced the ginger heavy and his companion, known as Wild Man and Stig are up to no good but without the resources of the force he has no idea just what he is getting into.

As Laver wanders around in professional Siberia, the case twists and turns revealing surprising links between a suburban supermarket store, a rainbow warrior runaway and a fiery car crash in Queensland. Though the plot isn’t difficult to predict it’s enjoyable to follow Laver Melbourne’s CBD as he tries to put the pieces together. Anyone familiar with the city is likely to enjoy the familiarity of the environs, and those who are not will appreciate the distinctly Australian flavour.

The narrative follows Laver, Stig and Wild Man and Jake, a supermarket manager assistant whose crush on beatnik Lou results in him unwittingly becoming tangled in the case. I think I would have preferred for the perspective to stay with Laver as I really enjoyed the cynical, wry humour of the hard edged cop, I particularly liked his observations of his colleagues in the ‘bike’ police. Laver is not just a cop though and his demotion plus his frustration at being ignored by the Brass spills over into his personal life, and not for the first time. Already a failed husband and father, his current fiance isn’t all sympathetic to his current predicament.

Roll With It is an entertaining read, there is enough intrigue and action to provide an interesting story and plenty of humour to amuse. I hope to see Tony Laver hot on the trail of some more bad guys soon.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
shelleyraec | 4 andra recensioner | Apr 20, 2013 |
Tony ‘Rocket’ Laver is a forty-ish detective with Victoria’s Major Crimes unit when he becomes the last in an embarrassingly long list of policemen who have shot a member of the public. The fact that the particular member of the public was a career criminal and had shot first is all but forgotten in the bureaucracy’s rush to distance itself from the messy end of policing so Laver is demoted to Senior Constable and shunted to the Mobile Public Interaction Squad (i.e. the bike cops offering directions to tourists and monitoring minor crimes) until a formal investigation into his case can be completed. There, struggling to cope with the double blow of having killed a man and being removed from everything – and everyone – he knows as far as his work is concerned, Laver’s instincts soon lead him into the investigation of something nefarious.

It’s hard to know which element of this highly enjoyable novel to highlight first but I’ll start with the characters. Laver is a genuinely interesting reinvention of the classic lone wolf style cop in that he isn’t a natural loner (he has oodles of friends and he likes being with them) but has the quality thrust upon him due to his demotion and quarantining as a scapegoat on which the police hierarchy can blame all their force’s violence and mistakes. We see Laver go through the experience of becoming isolated and watch how he struggles to cope without being able to rely on the friends and colleagues he once took for granted. But at heart Laver is a good cop with a dry, deprecating sense of humour which saves him from being maudlin or dour and there are some gorgeous details, such as the fact he deliberately does the dishes before leaving home on an errand that might kill him, that made him incredibly likeable for me There are other great characters here too, my favourite being the young supermarket assistant manager Jake, who inadvertently becomes involved in a tussle with the criminal underworld after falling for a fellow lap swimmer at his local pool. I was a little wary at first thinking Jake would be a leery kind of bloke with no depth but Place builds his character insightfully, showing how a young man might grapple with the challenges of developing his own personality and character.

The story unfolds in a series of short chapters from three main points of view: Laver’s, Jake’s and that of a drug dealer called Stig who arrives in his home town of Melbourne after leaving Queensland under a cloud. Of course the three threads will become intertwined but the various ways in which this happens do not require an unreasonable amount of disbelief suspension and there’s a cleverness to it all which makes turning each page a delight. Add in a good dose of natural humour and a few gentle digs at various aspects of modern life, such as the difficulty of spreading an environmental message to people seemingly preconditioned to ignore it, there’s never a dull moment in ROLL WITH IT.

The novel is also dripping with Australian-ness of a more subtle, mature kind than the ‘throw another shrimp on the barbie” kind of thing we used to see a few years ago. Of course a majority of the action takes place in the cafés, alley-ways and live music venues of inner-city Melbourne that are recognisable enough even though I am only an occasional visitor..But there’s more to place the novel here than that, including the often infuriating but highly realistic habit Australian blokes have of nicknaming everyone, usually with some kind of reference to sport. The underlying humour and sometimes contradictory sensibilities on display are also familiar and all combine to form a decently realistic depiction of modern city life for at least some of the Australian population.

Having heard virtually nothing about this book before opening the front cover I had no expectations of it but quickly developed a kind of childish excitement that I had stumbled upon something I was going to enjoy very much and I’d read a hundred pages before even realising it. I loved the mixture of farce, satire and thoughtfulness and will be sadly disappointed if ROLL WITH IT doesn’t turn out to be the first in a long line of crime novels from this very entertaining new voice in the genre.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
bsquaredinoz | 4 andra recensioner | Apr 14, 2013 |

Statistik

Verk
6
Medlemmar
62
Popularitet
#271,094
Betyg
½ 3.6
Recensioner
7
ISBN
16

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