Review: The Cleaner

The Cleaner by Mark Dawson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Come on,” Milton said. “Look at me—do I look like James Bond?”

I enjoyed ‘The Cleaner’, Mark Dawson’s first John Milton novel, having come to it with little expectation - the author sent me the book as part of his subscriber’s Starter Library but it sat on my Kindle until an interview with Dawson on Steve Cavanagh’s & Luca Veste’s very fine ‘Two Crime Writers and a Microphone’ podcast sparked my interest again.

John Milton, the British government’s longest serving assassin, decides to quit following a messy situation in France; but you cannot quit… Pursued by Control, and a younger, more ruthless would-be successor, Milton becomes involved with a woman from London’s Hackney area whose 15-year old son has been drawn into a criminal gang led by a charismatic rapper come drugs dealer, a sort of cross between Dizzy Rascal and Scarface. The story is fast moving, violent and very entertaining. Essentially the plot is what would happen if Bond became the Equaliser against the background of the London riots from a few years back. There is a little clunky dialogue and exposition but enough to keep me interested in the series.

And of course Milton looks like James Bond; Dawson takes his physical description straight from Fleming.

“His eyes were on the grey side of blue, his mouth had a cruel twist to it, there was a long horizontal scar from his cheek to the start of his nose, and his hair was long and a little unkempt, a frond falling over his forehead in a wandering comma.”

And Milton carries “very little in the way of possessions, but what he did own was classic and timeless: a wide, flat gun-metal cigarette case; a black oxidized Ronson lighter; a Rolex Oyster Perpetual watch.”

If you like Ian Fleming’s Bond, the John Milton series comes highly recommended. As does Cavanagh’s and Veste’s podcast.


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