Martina Cole is Britain’s top selling adult fiction hardcover author — with 13 blockbuster novels in print — but she is making her U.S. debut with the publication of “Close” on July 1.
The Hachette Book Group subsidiary, Grand Central Publishing, sent me an Advance Reading Copy of the novel recently. So, last week I was able to spend several days happily immersed in Cole’s tough, sexy world of London gangsters and the women in their lives.
It is hard to imagine Cole finding any less favor on this side of the Atlantic than she has on her own turf. “Close” reads like an amalgam of Jackie Collins and Mario Puzo, but with a depth of emotion that you won’t find in either of those writers’ best-sellers.
Why haven’t we been able to read Cole in U.S. editions before?
“Close” opens and ends at the death-bed of Lil Brodie — matriarch of a criminal clan that dominates the London underworld from the 1960s to the present-day. In between those inexorable book-ends are 500 pages of terrific entertainment.
Although “Close” is a shockingly violent and profane story, Cole roots the novel in the Brodie family life, dividing her focus between Patrick Brodie’s rise to the top and Lil’s life raising seven children, two of whom are destined to work within Patrick’s empire.
Lil is as savvy about the gambling and drinking and prostitution businesses as any crime-lord and Patrick puts her to work running the lucrative Soho bar and strip club division of his empire.
Cole writes men as well as she writes women and has an acute understanding of some of the most important ways men and women differ when it comes to sex and romance.
Here is Lil thinking about her beloved but sometimes wayward husband:
“Even Pat took a flier occasionally, a bit of sex on the side was on most men’s agenda and he was no different, he just had more access to it than the average guy. But that was as far as it went with him, the odd flier. Never the same bird and always without any kind of wooing. No drink bought, no meal provided, and definitely no offer of a lift home. He did not want a repeat performance, and he did not want to get involved in their lives in any way, shape or form…It was nothing more than an urge. It had nothing to do with his life, or his family.”
Throughout “Close” Cole keeps shifting her perspective from Patrick to Lil to their children (as they become adults) and the whole story rings true. The personal narrative makes the thrills in the gangland scenes all the more exciting — and harrowing — because the writer allows us to care about her dangerous (and frighteningly vulnerable) characters.
