The Yorkshire city of Leeds has its fair share of leafy suburbs – but there’s little sign of them in AA Dhand’s latest novel, The Chemist.
Instead, pharmacist Idris Khan plies his trade in Headingley, an area heavily populated with students, not too far from the city’s no-go areas where drug use is rife and the gangs hold sway. Idris is fighting to keep the business afloat, and it is the drug addicts who arrive each day for their dose of methadone that are the pharmacy’s bread and butter. Them, and Idris’s daily delivery to The Mews, a place full of darkness, despondency and drugs, ruled over by the formidable Jahangir Hosseini.
Jahangir is a real piece of work, helping refugees to arrive in the UK, before setting them up in The Mews and forcing them into addiction. He’s the supplier, so it’s a win-win situation. Among them is Al-Noor, who crossed land and sea to make the perilous trip to the UK from Syria, and lost his wife in the process. A former engineer, he is now enslaved to Jahangir and desperate to keep his young son safe and drug free.
As you can tell from the above, this is no cosy mystery; in fact The Chemist is a deeply disturbing and depressing read – and definitely not for the faint-hearted. AA Dhand is best known for his series featuring Bradford DI Harry Virdee (now a BBC series), and although those books pull no punches, they’re a hellscape away from this latest novel.
Setting location aside, in Idris we have a man pushed to the edge of reason and beyond, by the circumstances he finds himself in. He’s The Chemist of the title, and at times comes across as some skewed superhero, battling to right wrongs while staying under the radar as his life spectacularly implodes. His modus operandi is dubious, to say the least, but you’ve got to give the guy some credit for ingenuity.
Valiantly fighting the good fight – and bringing a touch of reason to all the madness – is DCI Brian Pitchford, another man who relies on drugs to get him through the day to day. In Pitchford’s case, they are to stave off the symptoms of a rare form of Parkinson’s. But although his body may be impaired, Pitchford’s brain is razor-sharp and he soon has his doubts about Idris… who seems a little too close to the action as a series of mysterious deaths occur. But this is no ordinary cat and mouse chase, and Dhand pulls out all the stops to keep the reader wrong-footed and downright shocked as this unsavoury tale unfolds.
It’s all so scarily realistic – which should come as no surprise, as AA Dhand was a pharmacist in London and Bradford before turning his talents to crime writing. The generally-held idea that pharmacy work is just a matter of putting labels on bottles and boxes is blown clear out of the water here, with life behind the counter portrayed warts and all. If the narrative falters, it is when long-winded names of (I assume) real medications are given, and their side-effects spelled out in perhaps too much detail for the lay person to comprehend fully.
The ending stretches credibility a bit and could divide readers, but suffice to say that there must surely be a second book with Idris Khan front and centre. He is a man of many layers and myriad secrets – and Dhand has teed up a sequel that will definitely be worth a read. In the meantime, be careful out there!
For another Asian character who is not what he seems, try The Waiter by Ajay Chowdhury.
HarperCollins
Print/Kindle/iBook
£7.99
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
