Reviews of Earlier Writing: CUCKOO

of Cuckoo

Altogether, she is the liveliest new detective to have appeared for years.

A striking success for a first novel.

Birmingham Post





I enjoyed Cuckoo from cover to cover; a crisp and modern novel; a superb and well-rounded heroine for the 1990's. I look forward immensely to Alex Keegan's next novel.

Terence Strong: Author of Whisper Who Dares and nine other best-selling thrillers.




One of the freshest murder mysteries I have read for some time.

South Wales Evening Post




One of Keegan’s strengths is the ability to push the plot rapidly forward, while Caz, the police and the reader are busy pursuing dead ends, cold clues, and mistaken avenues of enquiry. He knows how real detection and good novels often work in oblique ways, through detours that contribute nothing to the final destination but are essential for the journey.

The real achievement of the novel is to create, within pages, a whole world - Caz herself, the atmospheric John Street nick and its plausible cast of coppers. A firm favourite for me was Tom MacInnes, the older and wiser DI, nursing a drink and possibly a terminal illness, watching over the morning of Caz’s career from the evening of his own. The tired old cop and the keen rookie could easily have been a real cliché but the relationship between Caz and MacInnes is real and fascinating from page one. I wanted more of it. It is exactly the kind of relationship that Keegan writes well.
Remarkably for a first novel, Keegan’s prose avoids the purple and the plodding. Functional and stripped down, short sentences and short chapters move the plot rapidly along. Particularly good are the workaday scenes of police procedural, the occasional tensions, the back-chat and badinage of long-time colleagues, the in-jokes, the nicknames and the wind-ups. When the story demands a change of tempo, Keegan knows how to slow it down; for example a brilliantly woozy account of the slightly drunk Caz being attacked in a rainy street or the third sentence here:

The afternoon was flat, grey and ordinary, not much wind, not too cold, not actually raining. It was very ‘British winter’, very ‘Brighton’. The reflecting shops on the hill were just ticking over, white-coated assistants in slow-frame passing soft bread rolls in paper bags to solitary customers. Doors opened with pinging bells.

Good writing by anyone’s criteria...


Keegan’s strengths are a refusal to lay on clues with a trowel, a willingness to leave things unresolved, an openness to the untidiness of real life and a fundamental trust in the attentiveness of his reader.
Cuckoo is a taut and exciting read. At the end of the book I wanted the next instalment, I want to meet the characters again. Any novelist who can do that is on to a winner; to do it in a first book is remarkable. With Cuckoo, a novelist has arrived fully-fledged and with Caz Flood, an exciting new detective is up and running.


The Hype Report: Dillons South-Coast Book Stores




Caz is a pleasure to meet, a real police detective, there to chase killers, not blow the feminist trumpet.

H R F Keating, Crime Writer. Winner of two Golden Daggers





Alex Keegan