John Parker is a Graduate-qualified English/Spanish Teacher, owner and director of CHAT ENGLISH, an English Language Centre in Avilés on the north coast of Spain . A voracious reader, he has particularly loved horror fiction for many years.
DS Lucy Black and her boss DI Tom Fleming find themselves investigating the murder of a young man, found dead in a park with his head smashed in with a rock. Through an admission stamp on his hand, he is known to have attended a local gay club, hours before his death.
Coincidentally, Fleming had attended a meeting a few days before where a Pastor called James Nixon had presided over a meeting in which he advocated the stoning of gay people. A local Gay Rights group gets involved in the situation, angered by the man’s death. As tensions rise and tempers flare, the emergence of a far-right group targeting immigrants adds fuel to the fire. And as if that were not enough, a power struggle within the right-wing group adds further complications.
McGilloway’s novel is set in the days just before the Brexit vote and is very timely indeed. It deals with many social issues of the day. Strong anti-immigrant feelings, racial prejudice, sectarianism, gay bashing and sexual assault in the work place are just some of the many themes that the author attempts to deal with in this latest Lucy Black novel. McGilloway’s fans will be delighted, I am sure. Personally, I found it a bit hard going in the middle and the novel began to lose my attention. It was not until the story reached its dénouement that my initial interest was renewed. The ending is satisfactory and there will undoubtedly be more in the series.
