ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – Five by Five by Claire Wilson
Five by Five by Claire Wilson will be published by Penguin Michael Joseph on 29th August 2024 in hardcover, eBook and audiobook. My thanks to the publishers for the proof copy.
Just because the most dangerous criminals in society are caught and locked up, doesn’t mean they stop committing crime.
That’s where Kennedy Allardyce comes in – monitoring not just the prisoners, but also the staff.And she’s just stumbled across her most dangerous foe yet – rumours of a corrupt guard with lethal influence. And what’s worst, it seems they’ve already realised Kennedy is on their tail.
At least one thing is giving her joy – a blossoming relationship with Molly, a beautiful, enigmatic new guard.
Wouldn’t it be awful if the killer she’s hunting turned out to be the woman she’s falling for?
When a novel is billed as being anything like Line of Duty I’m in, and Five by Five piqued my interest even further because it’s set in a Scottish prison. Kennedy Allardyce works at HMP Forth Valley as an Intelligence Analyst. This means she monitors not only the prisoners for dodgy activities, but also the prison officers. Unfortunately, in the course of her work she has made a dangerous enemy of someone nicknamed Scout and she’s also falling for the beautiful but inscrutable officer Molly. Kennedy doesn’t know who she can trust.
I found Five by Five to be thoroughly gripping throughout. It was refreshing to read a crime thriller based in a prison and from the view of somebody whose role it is to try and prevent corruption – Kennedy may be fighting a losing battle there but she does her best. I thought the tug-of-war between her feelings for Molly and her growing distrust of her came across really well. Some of the prison scenes genuinely chilled me to the bone. They felt authentic, as did all of prison life, both for those incarcerated and those working there. The plot is incredibly tense and fast-paced and I flew through the whole book.
I did feel a bit let down by the ending though. I’m hoping there’s a sequel on the way but even so, I do think the finale was too abrupt and open-ended, and I found it confusing as I don’t know if I’d missed something or if it just wasn’t there. Other than that, I thought this was a fantastic debut and I’ll definitely read another book by Claire Wilson (sequel or not).
Claire Wilson is from central Scotland. Her debut novel, Five by Five, was the inaugural winner of the Penguin Michael Joseph Undiscovered Writers’ Prize. It is based on her day job as an Intelligence Analyst in a Scottish Prison.
