https://www.thetimes.com/culture/books/article/best-crime-mystery-books-2025-558wc8v2g

‘Lee Royle, police informer, gangster and cop killer, comes face to face with his nemesis where three roads meet (Junction 1A of the M25). Overcome with road rage, he challenges the “baby driver” who cut off his Range Rover, only to be stabbed with his own knife. Who will take over from “The King of Kent”? His beautiful wife Jo? His righthand man Craig, Jo’s brother? Or Eddie Pierce, Jo’s ambitious lover? Only one thing is certain: more blood will be spilt.

Ever since The Long Firm was published in 1999 it’s been clear Jake Arnott is half in love with sleazy death. If he has made the criminal underworld his patch, he goes one stage further in Blood Rival, plunging his characters into the Hades of Greek myth. Royle may share a lot of history with Kenneth Noye, the Kent-born villain associated with the Brink’s-Mat bullion robbery, but he is also Laius, king of Thebes, just as Jo is Jocasta and Eddie is Oedipus.

Familiarity with the myth in no way vitiates the impending sense of doom or pre-empts the events foreseen by Terry Rice (Tiresias), a blind hacker. He knows that the greatest riddle of all is the mystery of our self. What Don Winslow does for Homer’s Iliad in his Danny Ryan trilogy Arnott does for Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex — and the result is just as viscerally entertaining.’

Mark Sanderson The Times