The Girls Beneath by Ross Armstrong

This was a good mix of the personal and the procedural, and I do love a good procedural. 

Tom Mondrian is just a normal, rather boring guy who decides to become a Police Community Support Officer.  After passing his training he gets let loose on the streets of Tottenham and starts to do whatever a PCSO is asked to do.  Then tragedy strikes and he is hit in the head by a stray bullet.  Rather than dieing he beats the odds and survives with the shrapnel lodged in his brain.  It has a profound effect on him though, he now has a limp, he cannot recognise faces, his inhibitions are lowered, he struggles to always find the words to articulate his thoughts and he cannot read.  Despite all this the police force welcome PCSO Mondrian back to the beat - after all he is a wonderful PR opportunity.  They team him with Emre Bartu, a Turkish PCSO, and together they pound the city streets investigating vandalism and helping little old ladies.  At least, that is what they are supposed to be doing, what they are really doing is crashing in to the investigation of 3 missing girls.

As a character Tom Mondrian is very flawed, less so after his traumatic brain injury.  As a narrator he is warm, funny and entirely believable.  He also takes the reader down so weird and wonderful side alleys to the actual story.  Like his reasoning for pronouncing Paranoia as Paraneea, the history ot the Tottenham riots.  Most importantly he gives us a glimpse of a PCSO's life that is entirely believable and gives rise to some witty exchanges (I particularly enjoyed the one over communicating via the Airstream Radios...Over).

For this reader I found that I was not really that invested in the investigation.  I was much more interested in Tom's view of the world and his interactions with Bartu.  As things start to spiral to the denouement there is a good build up of tension and a sense of menace is generated by the author.  It wasn't a wholly unexpected outcome which usually annoys me but I had such an enjoyable time in Mondrian's company that I can forgive the transparency of some of the plot devices.

This was definitely not your normal thriller, not your normal narrator and one that I did derive great reading enjoyment from.