If It Bleeds by Duncan Campbell

Laurie Lane has been a crime reporter for 30 years: he's so old he can remember the days when typewriters filled the newsroom instead of computers. Indeed, he no longer writes for a newspaper but "a multimedia information provider" and hates having to deal with bosses who are corporate brown-nosers rather than real journalists. The day after he is approached to ghost the memoirs of Charlie Hook, the last of the oldschool London gangsters, Hook's brains are found plastered all over the walls of his mansion. If he can find out whodunit and land a real scoop he might be able to avoid being sacked for fiddling his expenses. In the meantime, his long-suffering wife, a minor country and western singer, leaves him for an older man.

With his love of yesteryear, it's surprising that Laurie isn't nicknamed "Memory Lane". His search for the killer leads him to Thailand and the bed of a voluptuous social worker from Sheffield. However, the answer lies much closer to home. If It Bleeds is a hilarious romp, full of in-jokes and bad jokes, that skewers the sick nostalgia for goons like the Krays and the stupidities of the modern media.

The plot may creak but the conversation crackles. It is a joy to read..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

The brilliant new novel about contemporary London gangland crime by the hugely well reviewed author of THE PARADISE TRAIL. Britain's best known gangster, Charlie Hook, wants to tell his life story and chooses crime reporter Laurie Lane as his reluctant ghost. But the next day Hook is dead, his blood and hair on the walls of his north London mansion. Who has killed the last of the London Godfathers, the man who used to be a driver for the Kray twins? Laurie is having his own problems - he's suspected of fiddling his expenses and his country singer wife has left him for an older man - but he needs to find the killer to keep his job. Could it be a Russian businessman with a love of Scottish poetry and something dodgy in his Hampstead garden?