Black Rose: A Midsummer Night’s Chutzpah, is a glorious mix of gritty realism, surreal humour, historical social commentary, and much else beside. Read it as a thriller – it’s fun, it’s racy, it’s full of action. Read it as study in gang warfare, beautifully observed from the inside, complete with the local slang that can often mystify (google "cockney rhyming slang" before you start!) Read it – no, REREAD it (you will want to) - as an unexpected study in what loneliness and brutality can do to a human mind, what strange paths the human mind can go down. It’s a story in multiple layers. The echoes in its subtitle are not accidental, and the book is not what you think at the beginning. At the end it made me think long about Ronnie Kray – a child of exactly the period and location – who died in Broadmoor, a high security psychiatric institution. A paranoid schizophrenic, yes. Violent, yes - just as violent as his saner twin brother, Reggie. But always a natty dresser, a mischievous, wicked humorist, and never short of chutzpah.