I'm not sure why this is called Roller-Coaster. (My edition of the book does not have a hyphen in the title.) At one point, Petrella (we've encountered him before) muses to himself about the image of two rollercoasters on the same track, headed straight at each other, and neither able to get off the track. A crash is inevitable. So, I guess, we are supposed to imagine that the various events and groups of people he is investigating are all going to "come together" and "crash", but I'm not sure that that is how it all resolved itself. Anyway...
This book was published in 1993 and feels far more modern than many of the other books I've read--in a word, seedy. It starts with a group of young teen boys going on a school trip to Amsterdam (sort of like if a group of kids here were taken to Tijuana for a a weekend bender...) and several sneak out late one night to get taken by a slimy individual to the Red District who gets them drunk and has them engage with prostitutes (it's left to our imagination what, exactly, a bunch of 12 year olds can do after many, many pints of beer) and filmed/photographed. Those photographs end up being smuggled into London and sold to various "subscribers." The scam is that men sign up for a "video of the month" sort of thing and once they get a few, the blackmailing begins.
Also figuring in this book is a dirty cop who was an English soldier assigned to police Northern Ireland but he did something awful there and was relocated to the poorest part of London, which is home to a large "West Indie" population. Also we have three boys who think they are cleverer than they are and they hide out in tiny crevices in abandoned dock building, spying on various gangs who use those old building to receive and ship out stolen goods and illicit stuff (like child porn), as well as punish gang members who disappoint the leaders in various ways. One event concerns an undercover cop who was tortured to death because a different dirty cop gave him away to the gang leaders. As I said, it has some real nasty stuff in it.
Patrick Patrella is older now: last time I saw him he was a detective, married, had a 4 year old son (Donald) and his wife had just had a miscarriage because of traumas caused by various criminals. Now, Patrella is a superintendent (not THE superintendent--apparently there are many) of the Q Division. He spends his time trying to dig through the papers in his inbox and trying to make sense of the various bad things happening in his area of concern. At home, Donald is not about 8 and they have a young baby girl who fusses if she isn't the center of attention.
Of course, he figures it all out in the end and, I guess, the various threads do weave together. And, not surprisingly, the last paragraph of the book has him decide he is going to quit the force, retire early, and go live with his father in Morocco. This is the 5th or 6th time he's made such decisions to my knowledge (and there are many other books featuring him that I haven't gotten to yet). So the question is: can he stay away this time or will another promotion lure him back?
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