I wanted to like this book but honestly couldn't. It dragged, was boring, ad the author's voice was like nails on a chalkboard. Others may have had a different reaction but, for me, it was a non starter.

I enjoyed the book on the whole. The details up to and around Operation Julie were really good and very well written. Sadly the book loses its way after that and some parts are a bit boring.

Undercover: Operation Julie, the inside story is the personal story of Stephen Bentley one of three undercover detectives in Operation Julie, a UK police investigation that took place during the 1970’s. The investigation was UK wide and aimed to bring down a number of LSD drugs rings. From a personal point of view despite being a fan of true crimes I’ve never heard or read about anything relating to the operation, so I appreciated the overview of other books given.

We begin after the operation and see the dire effects the undercover work had on Stephen, we are also given an insight into the standards expected of police during that time (these standards would not be accepted by the public now), including multilevel corruption.

We then go back in time to the beginning of Stephen’s undercover work, paired with Eric they are sent to mid-Wales to gather information about the drug dealers in that area. With very little formal training both undertook an identity change and had a cover story as to why they were in the area, we get to see how they are accepted into the community.

Steve discusses how feeling can get mixed up between himself and his persona feeling like the people he had met where is real friends at times, having to remind himself they weren’t and he had a job to do very aware one mistake could have given them away as police. There is an open discussion of what drugs he used and what effect they had on him, it was a relief to see such openness about these.

When the leaders of the operation had found out all the information they wanted, Steve and Eric were pulled from their undercover operations and back to their real lives without much chance for adjustment. The interviews and a limited section of the trails are discussed within the book but don’t go into tremendous detail.

Once the conclusion of the trails had been discussed I felt it should have been the end of the book, if I wanted to know more about the operation or about different drugs and their legal status I would have searched for them. The last quarter of the book felt like a collection of blog posts rather than coherent chapters of a book and repeatedly referred to a different edition of the book (I have to say I’m not interested in the content of an earlier edition, just the one I’m reading!). Aside from this I generally liked the book but there were a few parts that I felt could have been improved upon, I didn’t like the way he described women or travellers.

I rarely have any trouble rating a book, but with this one I did. If the last quarter wasn’t there I would have rated it 8/10 as it was interesting and unique, but unfortunately the last part made it drag so I drop to 6.5/10