He came to fight the fire. Someone made sure he died in it.
A wildfire is tearing across the North Pennines when a burning man staggers out of the flames. Detective Chief Inspector Jack Harris races to help him. He’s too late.
The dead man is firefighter Barry Mayhew. But beneath his burns, the pathologist discovers two shotgun wounds. One in each leg. Someone wanted him alive when the flames reached him.
A former soldier, Harris has seen punishment shootings before. This was meant to end in death. Yet the man everyone knew as Barry Mayhew proves remarkably difficult to trace.
At the classic-car garage where he worked, he claimed he was visiting his sick mother — but this woman doesn’t exist. The trail leads instead to a hospital children’s ward, a desperately ill baby — and a woman terrified of anyone coming through the door. She knew Barry by a different name.
With the raging fire threatening the hillside cottage he shares with his two rescue dogs, Harris must uncover what the firefighter was hiding.
Then he hears of another dead mechanic. He too was shot in the legs.
They say just six handshakes connect any two people. Harris needs to trace the connections between a dead man’s different lives.
Every hand the dead man shook leads Harris to another victim. One of them leads to his killer.
John Dean is a freelance journalist who has run his own business for twenty years and who draws heavily on his years as a crime reporter for newspapers and magazines to create his novels.
He is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association and cites Sherlock Holmes as his all-time favourite detective.
He lives in the South West of Scotland.
My thoughts: Burning someone to death is gruesome, a truly awful way to die. But under the fire, there lies a complicated and long buried story. As the police uncover a trail of murdered mechanics, each shot in the legs, they find themselves dealing with hardened criminals, men who stepped into the space left when the Kray twins went to prison. And revenge.
The case is knotty and the few witnesses are too scared to talk in case they’re next on the killer’s list. Liaising with multiple police forces, the team are racing against time to stop the killer and also to protect a young woman and her poorly baby from becoming part of the case.
Clever, full of twists and turns, with plenty of suspects, it takes time to unravel the truth.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
