THE HERO of "Crime," the latest novel from Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, is an Edinburgh copper, Ray Lennox, the detective who was featured as a sidekick in the author's 1998 book "Filth."
"Crime" opens with Lennox swilling Bloody Marys on a 747, filled with panic as we often are on airplanes, flying to Miami with his fiancee, Trudi, for a much-needed holiday. She sips chardonnay and thumbs through "Perfect Bride" magazine, thinking she's in for a dreamy couple of weeks in the sun, whereas Ray fears he's in a very bad way, near breakdown after having recently solved a child abduction case.
Ray caught the perpetrator, a pedophile eerily nicknamed Mr. Confectioner, but failed to save the victim, a 7-year-old girl who was raped and killed. For this he punishes himself.
"His thoughts are like a landslide; they seem to subside and settle, then before he knows it they're off again, heading for the same downhill destination," writes Welsh of his hero's semi-doomed state of mind. Ray has a damaged hand; inside, too, he's broken and bleeding.
On landing in Miami, Ray soon busts up with Trudi and flees in search of the booze that acts as one of the book's major propulsive agents. A trek across the city takes him to a sleazy bunker named Club Deuce, where the bar winds like a snake and mirrors everywhere make it impossible to avoid eye contact.
Ray knows now that he's not in Edinburgh, either Old Town or New. "The vodka is a good measure; Lennox liked that about the States, freepour. That sort of stuff alone made the American Revolution worthwhile," Welsh observes, his sense of humor sharp as ever. "He supplements this with a bottle of drinkable European imported beer."
At Club Deuce, Ray is picked up by two women, Starry and Robyn, and the action really gets going. "A lifetime of cigarette consumption seems to induce all the bar's smoke to congregate around Robyn's gray skin and cheap, flashy clothing like iron filings to a magnet," Welsh tells us, the brilliance of the simile providing both the key to Robyn's character and a warning of what's to come.
Robyn's desperate human needs attract trouble, as Ray finds out during a cocaine-fueled party at Robyn's place, when he sees a man molesting Tianna, the woman's 10-year-old daughter.
A fight breaks out, the place is trashed and Ray is left in charge of the girl, soon learning that she's been subjected to systematic abuse. Within hours, he's on the road, his companion a Lolita obsessed by reality TV.
