Kirjahaku

An imprisoned paedophile and child murderer unexpectedly appeals his conviction. In return for a reduced sentence, he offers to implicate those involved in the crimes who were never caught; to provide evidence of Police corruption at the time of the original investigation; and, most importantly, to reveal where the corpses of several long-sought, but never found teenage girls are buried.Unhappy at what may be about to happen, but at the same time desperate to locate the body of his own missing daughter, the father of one of these girls approaches Private Investigator Leo Rivers with a plea for help.Rivers' enquiries stir cold and bitter memories. Long-dead enmities flare suddenly into violence and a succession of new killings. Everyone involved, then and now, and on both sides of the law, is unprepared for the suddenness and ferocity with which these old embers are fanned back into life. As the investigation progresses, it gathers momentum, and now must speed inexorably to the even greater violence and sadness of its conclusion.The first of a trilogy of contemporary crime novels set in the city of Hull, Robert Edric's new novel is reminiscent of Chandler and Mosley, and yet remains uniquely British. Against the backdrop of Internet pornography, Police corruption and child murder, this dark and intense novel reads like a game of chess where each piece is invested with a deceptive significance.

Germany, spring 1946: The Nuremberg Trials are underway. In the Rehstadt Institute, a British "Assessment and Evaluation" centre, Alex Foster interrogates a succession of lesser war criminals, exploring their pasts and their crimes, and deciding their futures in the soon-to-be-reborn Germany.

Ex-soldier, poet and composer Ivor Gurney, suffering from increasingly frequent and deepening bouts of paranoid schizophrenia, is transferred to the City of London Mental Hospital, Dartford. Neglected by the military and by his own family, Gurney begins a descent into the madness and oblivion which he believes has long been waiting to claim him.

and Pollard, the local man of God whose faith is up for sale. But it is Anna, Quinn's sometime girlfriend, in charge of filling the dead cattle pits, who faces the deepest abyss of all.

1891. London is simmering in the oppressive summer heat, the air thick with sexual repression. But a wave of morality is about to rock the capital as the puritans of the London Vigilance Committee seek out perversion and aberrant behaviour in all its forms.Charles Webster, an impoverished photographer working at the Lyceum Theatre, has been sucked into a shadowy demi-monde which exists beneath the surface of civilized society. It is a world of pornographers and prostitutes, orchestrated by master manipulator Marlow, for whom Webster illicitly provides theatrical costumes for pornographic shoots.But knowledge of this enterprise has somehow reached the Lyceum's upright theatre manager, Bram Stoker, who suspects Webster's involvement. As the net tightens around Marlow and his cohorts and public outrage sweeps the city, a member of the aristocracy is accused of killing a child prostitute...

For Crowley's plan to work, he has to depend upon one of London's Most Wanted, ambitious gangland boss Tommy Fowler, who, presiding over a crumbling empire, can still get you anything you want - for a price. And what Crowley wants is a young man, Peter Tait, in Pentonville Prison under sentence of death for murder.

Autumn 1919. Elizabeth Mortlake, companion to her widowed sister-in-law, meets Jameson and Hunter, two ex-officers striving for some new measure of peace and order amid the ever-lengthening shadows of the war - one still hospitalized and awaiting the judgement of a court martial, the other seeking a more personal atonement for his unimaginable sins. Drawn increasingly into their lives here at the calm centre of the changing world, she gradually understands what a fragile peace they now inhabit, and how the ideals and bonds which once sustained and kept the two men alive, now threaten to destroy them completely.

But at the heart of this conflict lies a secret so dark, so unimaginable, that one man must be willingly destroyed by his possession of it, and the other must both sanction and participate in that destruction. 'More disturbing even than Conrad in his depiction of the heart of darkness .

It is 1847, northern England, and Charles Weightman has been given the unenviable task of overseeing the flooding of the Forge Valley and evicting its lingering inhabitants.

Branwell Bronte - unexhibited artist, unacknowledged writer, sacked railwayman, disgraced tutor and spurned lover - finds himself unhappily back in Haworth Parsonage, to face the disappointment of his father and his three sisters, the scale of whose own pseudonymous successes is only just becoming apparent.

Morlancourt, Northern France, 1920In the aftermath of the world's bloodiest conflict, a small contingent of battle-worn soldiers remains in France.

'Shows once more Edric's unassuming yet remarkable talent for conjuring up the lives of his characters' The Sunday Times ________The Fens, 1954. Many people have lost everything. Others just want the chance to begin again. For Jimmy Devlin, it's a little of both . . . It has been another tough winter. The floods are worse than anyone can remember and Fenlands are alive with blackmarketeers, vagabonds and chancers, all trying to make their way.Forced from his home by bailiffs, Jimmy has nothing to his name and needs to make a fresh start. But desperate people have a knack of finding trouble and he is no exception. It doesn’t take long before he’s caught in the wrong business with the wrong people and on the wrong side of the law . . .With his keen eye and trademark candour, Robert Edric explores what a man is capable of doing when he has nothing to lose.

'We must prise opinion from fact, belief from supposition and guesswork from whatever evidence must exist...'It is surely a simple case of hysteria. Four young women allegedly witness a terrifying apparition while walking in the woods. Has the devil really revealed himself to them? Are they genuine victims of demonic possession? Or, as most suspect, is their purpose in claiming all of this considerably more prosaic?The eyes of the country turn to a small Nottinghamshire town, where an inquiry is to be held. Everyone there is living through hard, uncertain times. The king is recently dead. It is a new century - a new world looking to the future. But here, in the ancient heart of England, an old beast stirs...Four men must examine the substance of the girls' tales and decide their fate: a minister, a doctor, a magistrate, and Merritt, an investigator - a seemingly perfect blend of the rational, the sacred and the judicial. And yet, as the feverish excitement all around them grows ever more widespread and infectious, there is both doubt and conflict among the members of this panel.The Devil's Beat explores the unforeseeable and unstoppable outcome of this inquiry during an alarming and unsettling time, when the whole of that small world seems in turmoil as, one after another, hitherto dependable natural checks and balances, beliefs and superstitions are challenged and then shattered.

'A small masterpiece' The Spectator My Own Worst Enemy is a wry and moving memoir of a working-class childhood in 1960s Sheffield, and the relationship between a touchy, tragicomic bully of a father and a son whose acceptance to grammar school puts him on another track entirely. With a novelist's eye, Robert Edric vividly depicts a now-vanished era: of working-men’s clubs; of tight-knit communities in factory towns; and of a time when a woman’s place was in the home. And he brings to colourful life his family, both close and extended – though over all of it hovers the vanity and barely-suppressed anger of his own father. My Own Worst Enemy is a brilliantly specific portrait both of particular time and place – the Sheffield of half a century ago – and a universal story of childhood and family, and the ways they can go right or wrong.

In the second volume of the Song Cycle trilogy, Hull private investigator Leo Rivers is approached by the mother of a girl who disappeared a year earlier in violent and mysterious circumstances.