Joan's picks: The Call and The Trading Game : A Confession

The Call is about Detective Sergeant Honey Chalmers who, after surviving a brutal attack goes back to her small home town to care for her mother. In the course of her work she’s become too close to an informant who’s linked to a gang made up of 501 returnees from Australia, and she’s pretty sure the informant, Kloe, is now in trouble. Honey’s private life is complicated and when Kloe turns up in the small town, events converge. This is a terrific thriller, based in our own backyard and I hope will be the first in a series. 

The Trading Game : A Confession by Gary Stevenson. Gary grew up in poverty in east London . The one thing he had going for him was his intelligence – he’s a maths whizz and put that to good use to win a place at the London School of Economics where he discovered that rich people think that poor people are stupid – something he then used to his advantage. He got a job at Citibank where he started to make really stupid money and discovered that enough is never enough. He worked incessant hours and had no other life, losing friends along the way - eventually having a breakdown after which he got his life back together. He now campaigns against inequality, having come to realise that while the money was good it can be at the expense of his soul. 

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