What You Don't Know by David Belbin – review

October 1997: MP Sarah Bone, having taken her Nottingham seat in Labour's landslide election, is now a junior minister. Scandal brews for the city's Crack Action Team when the project's leader is discovered to be the main source of Nottingham's drug supply. In a damage limitation exercise, Sarah is asked to sit on a replacement project, chaired by charismatic and ambitious Paul Morris. Meanwhile, her former lover Nick Cane is on probation for a five-stretch for possession and struggles to make fresh beginnings, volunteering and tutoring a promising GCSE student, Jerry, who lives in a hostel where the girls all work the streets for their dealer boyfriends. Jerry has a clandestine lover who promises to help her escape to university. When Sarah finds Nick work at the project, a dangerous web spins around all three. It's a story rich in resonance: of how New Labour sold out, leaving the children of cities such as Nottingham easy prey for organised crime; and a perceptive study of how the abuse of girls like Jerry is fuelling one almighty tinderbox.