Books
The Drowning Pool
Jago’s life is dominated by an overbearing father, a dead brother and another man’s wife.
Synopsis
Jago’s life is dominated by an overbearing father, a dead brother and another man’s wife. His father blames Jago for his brother’s death. Jago accepts this irrational interpretation of the fishing accident as a simple mechanism that allows his father to cope. At the heart of the novel are two intense relationships. Working together with his father, scratching a living, fishing for lobsters off the Cornish coast, arguing as they work. The one release for Jago is Diane and a fling that quickly developed into the most intense of love affairs. All this despite her upcoming marriage to Henry. Despite…
4 Bones Sleeping
Synopsis
A few weeks after the end of the war. Crime reporter Jack Carter becomes drawn into the shady world of clubs, extortion and women of the night. A man out of his depth, struggling to come to terms with the chance of sudden wealth and the inherent dangers that went hand in hand in those post-war years. Despite the risks, he decides to sting an unbalanced extortionist. Its an impulsive and outrageous con. One that Jack soon realises, means a life looking over his shoulder for men hell-bent on revenge. Thirty-five years later and Jack lives the life of a small…
A Boneless Kiss
Synopsis
Helen Mably suddenly vanishes, a brilliant academic with a complicated lifestyle and a deeply disturbed past. Twenty years earlier Helen was a carefree, precocious teenager, until she was assaulted by three policemen in a police social club. Helen’s memory of the event has been clouded by her father’s betrayal. Chief Inspector David Mably was the policemen’s boss and he always maintained that he never covered anything up, just persuaded Helen that if she pressed charges, she would be exposed to sharp defence barristers and intrusive journalists. Stuart’s an Oxford journalist finds out about Helen’s disappearance from her father. David Mably gives…
Beneath
Synopsis
A married couple drive the city streets looking for young girls to pick up. They are methodical, obsessive and dangerously perverted. For years they’d lured girls back to their charnel house, where they spent the next few days abusing them. Eve was a cruel, connoisseur in the perverted world of sexual torture. Whereas Caleb was just a brutal deviant, with little self-control. She understands the growing risks however and tries to persuade her husband that they’d trawled the streets for too long. Their luck wouldn’t hold for ever, there were just too many security cameras now. She told him bluntly,…
Salt of Their Blood
Synopsis
Stuart’s feckless life suddenly comes into sharp focus as he begins a sweeping, illicit love affair with Kathy. The daughter-in-law of his mother’s best friend. The lovers are reckless, indiscreet and hopelessly in love. But all the time Stuart is haunted but events from twelve years earlier. As a young boy he watched a dark love affair blossom between his uncle and Shirley, Kathy’s mother-in-law. This affair somehow becomes the trigger for two apparently unconnected incidents. First Stuart hears the screams of a mechanic as a five-ton bus comes crashing down on his head in what the coroner described as…
Small Town Nocturne
Synopsis
A photographer takes some pictures of a couple leaving a hotel arm in arm. He took them for no good reason, other than the fact that he despised the man involved. A married, weasel of a man, head of the local council’s planning department and out carousing with someone other than his wife. When Stuart’s editor published an article about local hotels, he used a photograph of the happy couple below his banner headline. Neither Stuart nor his boss realised at the time that a lethal mistake had just been made. Never one uncomfortable with a complicated lifestyle, Stuart compounded…