William Shaw (http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/william-shaw) has written two previous books: Travellers and Spying in Guru Land both published by Fourth Estate, and his work has appeared in many newspapers and magazines around the world including The Times, the Independent, Vogue, Tatler, GQ, Esquire and Cosmopolitan. He is a contributing editor of Arena in the UK and Details in the US. His latest novel is A Song From Dead Lips (2013). The summary is as follows. It’s London in October 1968. As Beatles fans encamp outside Abbey Road Studios up the road, the Marylebone CID is as much an old boys’ club as it ever was: comfortably sexist, racially prejudiced and crawling with corruption. Detective Sergeant Cathal Breen is the pariah of the office, having just run out on a fellow officer held at knifepoint, when it’s shaken up by the arrival of WPC Helen Tozer: awkward chatterbox, farmgirl, and the first woman to enter the murder unit – apart from the secretary. When a young woman is found naked and strangled in well-to-do St John’s Wood, her identity is a mystery. The neighbours offer nothing but xenophobic suspicions, witnesses are staying silent; only Tozer’s savvy gives Breen a lead. Following it, resourceless, deep into the rural backwaters, Breen sees one dead body lead to another – a trail of bloodshed taking them dangerously close to a killer with everything to lose. The first in a trilogy featuring DS Breen and WPC Tozer, set against a clashing backdrop of sixties idealism and a corrupted CID on the brink of exposure.
400 pages in Quercus
ISBN 978-1782064169
William Shaw