Tony Thompson 'Gangs: A Journey into the Heart of the British Underworld'

This was an impulse buy. I picked this up at HMV one evening and finished half the book while I was at a cafe and the rest of it the day after.

I was curious. The British underworld. All I knew of it was the occasional reports on daring heists in the papers and the impressions gained from the slick British gangster movies from Guy Ritchie which felt like over the top cartoons.

Anyhow, the overview from Thompson, a veteran journalist, was highly fascinating, the reality was downright dirty, violent and involved huge amounts of money. Some of the crimes were surreal and absurd in feel, nothing like the slick silliness of gunplay seen in movies. The violence, the scale, the existence of a large underworld and the sophistication were there. As for police countermeasures? There was little hint of it.

In any case, the cover looked like a poster from a Guy Ritchie movie, but the cover came from a stock photo. Real? Probably not. It's probably a posed and touched piece.