Charlie Owen has been carving out a name for himself as the author of tough and pungent crime novels, and his upwards trajectory is continued with Two Tribes, a novel which delivers quite the same kind of punch as its predecessors. The time is the 1970s, and the police in north Manchester are girding their loins for a large scale riot as extremists line up for a major confrontation. Handstead New Town in north Manchester in at the epicentre of this potential flashpoint, and the beleaguered band of coppers are desperately formulating tactics. DCI Dan Harrison has a useful resource: the hooligan cops in uniform (who we met in previous books in the sequence), but he"ll need everything he can call on to get through the most challenging policing problem of his career. And it"s not as if he had limitless physical resources of his own to summon up -- he has been working round the clock, and is feeling the effects. Needless to say, the ordinary problems of crime in the area have not taken a holiday, and another major headache is a serial rapist who is cleverly eluding capture. Not to mention an outbreak of murderous violence among the retired, a persistent flasher and numerous other intractable problems; Dan Harrison has his work cut out for him.Charlie Owen"s publishers invoke both Life on Mars and The Sweeney on the jacket to give readers an idea of what they will find between the covers here, and these two references are canny subjects to mention; although Two Tribes is not a parodic as the former, we see a lot of the same kind of policing as we find in the Gene Hunt squad (with the same sardonic sense of humour on display), and the tough coppers of The Sweeney are hovering in the background. Charlie Owen was, of course, himself a policeman, and has personal experience of everything from the Poll Tax riots to football hooliganism. He"s the perfect chronicler for the barely controlled mayhem that he delivers in his series of novels. --Barry Forshaw