Review | Hong Kong triad invades New York crime gangs’ turf in Rat Island, gritty John Steele novel
- It’s 1995 and the 14K seek a new base lest China clamp down once it resumes sovereignty over Hong Kong. In their way is an undercover cop sent to thwart them
- Steele gives a squalid tour of the Rotten Apple replete with gut-wrenching violence, drug taking, paranoia and a cast of colourful characters
Rat Island by John Steele, pub. Silvertail Books
You might want to take a shower after reading John Steele’s Rat Island.
So authentically begrimed are the people and places in his New York-based thriller that spending time with and in them can leave a reader feeling soiled: testament to the author’s proficiency in bringing to life the sordid, stinking reality of the world of organised crime.
From a junkies’ “shooting gallery” in Manhattan’s Alphabet City to a Midtown topless bar, and from any number of basements and abandoned warehouses to fleapit hotels and cockroach-colonised apartments, Steele revels in taking his audience on an off-piste version of the tourists’ New York City adventure. His is a squalid tour, with prime sightseeing vantage points featuring extreme violence, terror, heroin consumption, paranoia and personal services courtesy of a Vietnamese dominatrix.
Being a 1995 incarnation, this Rotten Apple is far from today’s sanitised city of safe streets and astronomical property prices. But it does represent prime real estate for a criminals enterprise looking to establish itself on the turf of the Irish mob and especially that of the Chinatown tong: Hong Kong’s 14K triad.
Fearing a post-handover communist clampdown, the 14K plan to move operations out of the territory – which is where Sergeant Callum Burke of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force comes in. Going undercover, Burke must infiltrate the Irish network to disrupt its arrangements with its new triad partners and rivals, who are keen to eviscerate the tong.
