This is J D Maguire’s fourth book published by Pegasus; Gradh and Other Short Stories, Election: Return to Gradh and Walking Shadows were the previous three. He also co-wrote the play While Truth Puts on Its Shoes. He worked as an English teacher at Bellshill Academy for over twenty years, running a creative writing class for adults there.
Haunted by the conviction of Brian Shirhan for a pensioners murder, Detective Chief Inspector Rob Kennaway cant silence the voice in his head whispering that they got it wrong. Its a feeling that gnaws at him, a stark contrast to the celebratory mood in the station. With a wife whose memory is fading and a career built on integrity, Rob cant simply move on. Secretly assigned to tie up the cases loose ends, he and Detective Sergeant Liz Delaney, a young widow still navigating her own grief, begin to ask dangerous questions. Their search for the truth becomes a deeply personal quest for redemption, leading them from a grieving mans desperate pleas to a bizarre corporate retreat that erased a day from a participants life. As they peel back the layers, Rob and Liz find themselves not just solving a crime, but fighting for their own souls against a faceless enemy that threatens to destroy everything they hold dear.
Two hitmen, a struggling artist, a supermarket worker, a schoolteacher and an actor are all Walking Shadows. Each attempting to find some meaning to the trials, tribulations and tragedies that their brief time on the stage of life has seemingly decreed for them.
Gràdh becomes the centre of the British political world, in what is an otherwise unremarkable General Election. A journalist is sent by the county's biggest tabloid newspaper to the small village to ‘report' on the comeback of Thomas Lord.
Gràdh - As secrets and scandal lurk beneath this seemingly perfect and picturesque village, will David Tait be tempted to ‘cash in' on its latest catastrophe?
