Longlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2010.
Martina Cole was shortlisted for the Specsavers ITV3 Crime Thriller Bestseller Dagger 2009.
Tough women in the tough world of London’s East End gangland dominate Martina Cole’s many novels, this is her fifteenth. What she has done is to create a human side to a gritty, violent world of powerful people disregarding the law. In doing so the villains and their families, sweethearts, rivals, victims and underlings become people we either love or hate. This, not her best, features some very nasty characters.
Imelda Dooley is scared. Really scared. She's played hard and fast and now she's
been caught.
She's pregnant and now she's on her own. Her father, not a
man to mess with, will see that somebody pays for this. And it's not going to be
her.
So Imelda Dooley tells a lie. A lie that literally causes murders.
When Mary Dooley's husband is killed in the night's events, she knows she must
graft to keep the family afloat.
And graft she does, becoming a name in
her own right. But she still has to watch her daughter's life spiral into a
vicious, hate-fuelled cycle of drugs and prostitution. Caught up in the carnage
that is Imelda's existence are Mary's adored grandchildren, Jordanna and
Kenny.
Pretty little Jordanna isn't yet three and she already knows far
too much. All she can do is look after her baby brother, Kenny, and try not to
draw unwanted attention to herself. Set in the East End of London from the
tail-end of the seventies up until the present-day, THE BUSINESS is a tale of
drugs, prostitution and a young girl's fight for survival -- against all the
odds.
Martina Cole is the acknowledged queen of crime drama with more than twenty novels to her name, of which over a dozen have been No.1 bestsellers.
Several of Martina's novels have been adapted for the screen, including The Take and The Runaway which were shown on Sky 1 to remarkable reviews. In addition, Two Women and The Graft have been adapted for the stage; both were highly acclaimed when performed at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, which also staged Dangerous Lady in 2012, celebrating twenty years since Martina's debut novel was published.
Martina Cole is a phenomenon. She continues to smash sales records with each of her books, which have sold thirteen million copies. In 2011 Martina surpassed the £50 million sales mark since records began and was the first British female novelist for adult audiences to achieve this - and she has spent more weeks in the No. 1 slot on the original fiction bestseller list than any other adult novelist. Her hard-hitting, uncompromising and haunting writing is in a genre all its own - no one writes like Martina.
