The blurb:
One dead man and a missing lottery ticket.
Two family members who need that money to get away from the rundown Blades Edge estate.
Three local gangsters who want that money for themselves.
Meet Malachite Jones – the foremost (and only) psychic medium on the gritty Blades Edge estate. All he wants are two things: a name that isn’t ‘Malachite’, and a quiet life. And maybe some real psychic powers, but he’s making a living without them.The first Mal Jones and Jackie Singh Kattar adventure: a chaotic rollercoaster ride through a Yorkshire landscape full of double crossing friends, dogged police, psychotic gangster and voices from the other side.
The review:
I was going to start this review by pointing out that A Numbers Game is the crime debut of RJ Barker, fantasy author of Age of Assassins and The Bone Ships. However, I’ve since been informed that the author of this book — RJ Dark — has nothing at all to do with the aforementioned Barker. Nothing. Nuh-uh. They both just happen to look exactly alike, speak in the same accent, and write books.
But now that I’ve got that out of the way, fans of Barker’s previous series might be wondering what to expect from this. And while I don’t know how much overlap there is between fans of fantasy and crime, I do think that there will be a lot here for these people to like.
There is almost a slight fantasy twist to A Numbers Game. Mal Jones is an ex-addict working as a psychic medium in a rough part of fictional Yorkshire — Blades Edge. He’s not really psychic, obviously. He’s just a conman with an office. But not everyone knows that. So when a woman appears looking to find her recently deceased husband’s winning lottery ticket — a husband who is the son of local crime lord, Trolley Mick — things get a little… dicey. Mal is tasked with finding said lottery ticket, under threat of getting a bit of a kicking. Or, y’know, murdered.
The one thing that Mal has going for him is that he’s friends with Jackie Singh Kattar — local nutter and a bit of a crime boss himself. Fans of Barker will recognize this dynamic. While Mal is a down-on-his-luck guy who is generally quite hopeless outside of his skillset, Jackie is his very competent friend/mentor figure. It feels familiar, given the relationships that the likes of Girton and Joron have certain other characters, and this “bromance” was probably my favourite part of the book. Mal and Jackie play off each other in a way I found really fun, needling each other at every opportunity whilst fully aware that they’d do anything to keep the other safe (and with all their fingers).
A Numbers Game has that “falling dominos” kind of feeling. Something goes wrong, which causes other things to go wrong, and when the characters try to fix it, they make a bunch of other stuff go wrong. It’s a winning structure, one that I mentioned I really enjoyed in my recent Shadow of a Dead God review, and in this instance it made for a very quick and binge-able read. The book does take a little while to get going in the early stages, as RJ Dark introduces us to his world and characters, but it’s plain sailing from there on out.
I also really enjoyed how the mystery developed, and how the layers of the different “suspects” and wider character cast were peeled back. A pair of characters that I particularly loved were the Twins, Trolley Mick’s sons and trusted goons, who’re a bit thick (bless them), but always willing to improve themselves. Specifically through the use of a pocket dictionary, which they use to broaden their vocabulary whenever they come across a word they don’t know, with some hilarious results.
One thing that I should warn potential readers about, though, is some of the offensive language used by some characters in this book. While you can explore and portray things like racism through clever metaphors and stand-ins when writing a speculative fiction novel, that isn’t really the case when you’re writing contemporary, real-world fiction. A Numbers Game features some racist, islamophobic, and misogynistic language — always portrayed as wrong, mostly from antagonistic characters — that some readers will not want to read in their books. I know that this book did have a sensitivity read, but I wanted to make sure to mention this rather than have it catch any readers off-guard.
If you like the sound of a very British-feeling crime novel revolving around a hapless conman and a suspiciously competent crook, then A Numbers Game might be a book that you should check out! I want to say that it reminds me a little of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, but given that that’s the only other British crime novel I’ve read, I don’t know how much authority I can say that with! In any case, I had a lot of fun with this one.
We received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review. Thank you to Wavesback for the review copy!
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