**Winner of the Crime Writer's Association John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award 2005 for best first crime novel**
What’s the best thing about Hackney?
The bus outta here!
And that’s exactly where Elijah ‘Schoolboy’ Campbell needs to be in a week’s time, heading out of London’s underworld. He’s taking a great offer to leave it all behind and start a new life, but the problem is he’s got no spare cash. The possibility of lining his pockets becomes real when he stumbles across a mobile phone. But it’s marked property, and the Street won’t care that he found it by accident. The Street won’t care that the phone’s his last chance to change his life. And he can’t give it back because the door to redemption is only open for 7 days.
7 days to exchange the mobile for cash.
7 days to cut the mobile’s line rental to the Faces tracking his every move.
7 days to get out of a world where bling, ringtones and petty deaths are accessories of life.
Schoolboy knows that when you’re running hot all it takes is one call, one voicemail, one text to disconnect you from this life – permanently.
And getting deeper into his old lifestyle may mean that he never catches that bus . . .
'An exciting new urban fiction... a striking debut' - Nicholas Clee, Guardian
'Very sharp... An impressive first book with a strong sense of place and community' - Sunday Telegraph
'Sharp-eyed, even sharper-tongued chase story... distinctly different; well worth seeking out' - The Literary Review
'A fantastic piece of debut writing' - Robert Elms, BBC Radio London
'Lock, stock, and a twenty-year-old mobile phone, at last I know my way round the North London gun belt!' - Nigel Planer, actor, writer and comedian
About the Author
Dreda Say Mitchell was born into London’s Grenadian community in the 1960s. She works as an education adviser and lives in London’s East End. This is her first novel.
Publication date for
Running Hot: 1st November 2004
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Running Hot - Dreda Say Mitchell