Stone Cold

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I have read ”Stone Cold” written by Robert Swindells. It’s a book about a boy, who’s called Link. You never get to know his real name. Link left home early in his childhood, and so he became homeless. After a while he ended up in London, where he found some other people, and where he also met some people that he will never forget. Ginger is a person that Link meets early in the book. They become really good friends, and are happy together, but one day, Ginger disappears. Real soon after, he meets a new person, and this time it’s a girl. She’s called Gail, and looks really good, therefore Link is a bit surprised that she hangs out with him. More people are disappearing, and the trace leads to an unknown person. Gail and Link decide to find the mysterious man, and it all ends up with Link in trouble, and people showing who they really are.
At the same time as the book follows Link and his friends and actions, there are chapters where you get to follow the unknown man and what he does. His nickname is Shelter, and he is the “bad person” in this book.

There aren’t so many people in this book that the plot is about. Link is the main character and was born in a usual family, with a mother and a father, like other families. When Link was fourteen his father ran off with a new girl, and his schoolwork started to get worse and worse. Soon after that his mother got a new boyfriend too, called Vincent. Link couldn’t stand him playing around with him, so he left home after a while and ended up in London, as a homeless. He feels really lost in the beginning, and is not at all used to be begging money from others. Even though he’s the main character you don’t know so much about him or how he acts. They mostly talk about where he sleeps, and what he’s doing during the days, which is different from day to day.

Shelter is also important in this book. He’s a strange guy who collects corpses, which is dead bodies. Many books (and films) have one or more “evil person”, and in this case, Shelter is for sure that one. I think Shelter has some sort of problem, because his behaviour isn’t normal at all. Gail and Ginger are people that Link spends much time with, but never the three of them together. Without them, Link wouldn’t have survived his streetlife.

The setting is mainly different streets and sleeping places like parks, doorways and sidewalks all round in London. There are also some hostels that Link sometimes spends some nights at, but otherwise, it’s quite hard to describe the setting in this book. But I think that Swindells describes the areas quite well, he doesn’t say “too much” about the streets etc, just enough.


One thing is clear about Shelter, he doesn’t like bums and dossers. One big reason for that is that his old job was to change scruffy people to soldiers, and he was good at that. But suddenly, he got fired, and started thinking about some sort of “revenge”. He’s always extremely calm, even though his “work” now, which is to kill bums, is very exacting. When two policemen came one time, he was as cool as ever. Shelter also acts like a smart person, he has his apartment on the ground floor, which is perfect for his actions. He has bought a cat, so he’s looking friendlier. You can also see that he’s quite clever when he fools his victims (dossers and bums) to his house. It’s quite fun to see how he lures all those “just with his mouth”. Shelter’s really weird I think, first of all he is weird because he’s acting like he does, and he also has to be one of those who simply just can’t take a defeat in any form. Otherwise he wouldn’t have started to kill dossers just because he was fired. One good example of that is one time, when a dosser laughed at him, after he had asked for some money. Shelter couldn’t really take it, and decided to get rid of that person, and to get a new body to his little “collection”. That is not a normal behaviour.

Shelter’s golden rule is “always check everything”, and maybe that’s why he always acts so cool, because he has checked everything, and knows that nothing can go wrong.

Actually, I didn’t choose this book because it was the shortest. I read all the backsides of the books, and found this one must funny to read. Anyway, the book’s written, as I have said, in two “versions” at the same time. I think that’s good, even though I didn’t understand that it was written like that right away. It’s fun to read it that way, one time for example, it first was a chapter when Link met the unknown person and you saw it from his “eyes”. In the next chapter, you saw it from Shelter’s eyes, when he met Link, who then was an unknown person to him. I have read some other books that are like this, and it’s real fun in my opinion. The language in this book is quite hard sometimes, because there are a couple of words that don’t exist in the Swedish language etc, and it’s also much slang, like fuzz and so on. I like books like this, when there’s a murder and someone is trying to figure out who it is etc. In fact, books like this, also called detective novels, are 80-90 % of all the books I have read. The plot is quite unreal, at least there don’t exist many people like Shelter in this world. Swindell described the areas sufficent, it wasn’t too much useless descriptions, and there weren’t too few, so you did “understand” what it looked like, it was simply just enough, which is good.
Due to the fact that this is quite a short book, it’s definitely worth a chance. I liked it, and if you like detective novels, you’ll probably like this one too. Parts of the book were unfortunately boring, but it never got too boring. Because everytime it started to get boring, it almost always came a chap...