Redcap

Brian Callison, Canongate Books. It is Cyprus, in 1957. Bill Walker is a veteran Royal Military Police staff sergeant - something of a legend within the Corps, albeit a tarnished one. Maintaining his hard-as-nails Redcap image is difficult enough considering he is a reluctant hero desperate to stay alive. And this aim is endangered when only he knows that his commanding officer, Major Steadman, is a murderous psychopath who has sworn to kill him. What's worse is that Walker has no hard evidence despite Steadman's killing of an unarmed child. But when a further atrocity occurs, Staff Sergeant Bill Walker RMP can no longer turn a blind eye. Ambush, torture, courts martial, prisoners falling down guardroom stairs, the pursuit of armed fugitives from military justice, sudden deaths in coach accidents and brothels, murder of the innocent and not-so-innocent.and Bill Walker, bystander, nearing a well-deserved retirement, is a marked man in deep turmoil. Set initially against the violent backdrop of the Cypriot EOKA insurgency, "Redcap" moves to Germany and the British Army of the Rhine a decade later in the late 60's where Walker finds a ten year old spectre returning to haunt him. The climax to each half, in the first a court-martial, in the second a verbal confrontation between four strong-willed men behind closed doors, is some of the most dramatic and powerful writing in the long history of war fiction.…