A former Customs and Police Officer, Andrew Hill’s first book in a crime series set in the New Forest, where he lived for 30 years, will be published in Spring 2022. An avid reader across the crime genre and regular at crime writing festivals, he now lives in West Sussex and works in property.
Lydia Wright was once a crusading journalist, but she’s been side-lined to the ‘graveyard shift’ on her newspaper and spends most of her time reporting on the lives of micro-celebrities and reality TV.
She receives a video (from seemingly anonymous source); upon opening it she finds footage of an apparent murder on the Underground. It looks like a chance for Lydia to revive her stalled career.
However, there’s no reports of the incident, no body, witnesses and no trace of the killers. Even the person who took the footage has vanished. As doubt and the inkling of ‘fake news’ starts to creep up on her, she receives an ominous phone call and is left in little doubt that there are other parties interested in what happened on the train.
You want reliable information and may need to cross some lines to get it, there’s only one place to get it and that’s Michael Stringer. Stringer has no qualms about dabbling in ‘grey areas’ to get what his clients need and will pay handsomely for. But, with the murder on the train, his work and life are unraveling. He needs to know what Lydia already knows and will pursue that relentlessly.
Inevitably drawn to the story, Lydia is poking a hornet’s nest of dirty money and political power where information is the ultimate commodity and human life has little or no value.
Michael and Lydia are on a collision course to a place where they can trust no one and death could be just moments away.
This forth novel from Rod Reynolds is a departure for him, in that the setting is 21st Century London, rather than the U.S.A. in the middle of the 20th Century. However, there is a journalist as main protagonist and so not everything has changed. As a self-confessed fan of the Charlie Yates series, there was a little trepidation in starting this new venture. But Rod has used his encyclopedic knowledge of London to bring us a convincing and wholly realistic story.
He neatly nips at our psyches by using shady financial doings, our paranoia of who is watching and monitoring us, our lack of trust in politicians and the value and leverage that information can offer. This enables him to bring us a well-researched, complex and fully realised story with three-dimensional lead characters. The creeping tension and mistrust is palpable and there’s an absolutely cracking end reveal.
Put this on your list to read, it’s an absolute belter!
