Graves don’t stay shut. Neither does the past.
Synopsis
A rifle cracks over a London cemetery on a Sunday morning, and DI Alfie Hargreaves should be the one bleeding out on the grass. He isn’t. A young couple sheltering nearby are, and that’s the kind of luck Alfie’s learned never to trust.
The near-miss tears open a wound he’d spent twenty-five years getting over. A note lands from, his old informant Raine, jumpy as ever, claiming Maggie Fenley might still be alive. Maggie. Daughter of East End crime boss Reggie Fenley. The girl Alfie loved before everything burned, literally, on the night his mother died and the affair that could’ve got them both killed finally caught up with them. 1997 comes rushing back whether he wants it or not.
He doesn’t get to sit with the memory long. A killer’s working the city now, leaving tarot cards on his victims like calling cards, and every thread Alfie pulls loops back to the Fenleys. Garth Fenley has beaten cancer and come home to settle debts, starting with the conviction that Alfie put his brother away. And then there’s Francesca Ravenwood, another ghost from Alfie’s past, arriving with secrets of her own and evidence that doesn’t quite add up.
Paired with the sharp, guarded DC Jayne Morgan, who is fighting her own battle to be taken seriously in a force that underestimates her. “Far too ‘andsome to be a copper.” Were the welcoming words from Alfie. Together they must untangle old loyalties, older lies, and a killer who might already be standing closer than either of them realises. And Alfie still has to work out whether the woman he never stopped loving is a friend, a ghost, or the most dangerous thing in the room.
Everybody comes with a tarot card, and every card leads back to the Fenleys. The sniper missed Alfie once. He’s starting to wonder whether it missed at all. And if the killer has been dealing him the past one card at a time, somebody wants him to reach 1997, and he needs to know why before the deck runs out.
Peaky Blinders meets Rebus, with a Prime Suspect edge. Gangland roots colliding with a detective who treats procedure as a suggestion, paired against a partner the whole force keeps mistaking softness for weakness.
Author’s thoughts
I built this one around a copper who’s spent twenty-five years chasing a debt he never repaid. Hargreaves gets results, and that’s the only currency he’s got left with the Met. They put up with him the way you put up with a smoke alarm that goes off every time you fry bacon, irritating, impossible to switch off, and somehow always right when it matters.
Detective Constable Jayne Morgan was raised the way old money raises its daughters. Private. Polished. Quietly ruthless, with an instinct for never picking a fight she isn’t sure she’ll win. On paper, in a room together, you’d call them a mismatch. Out on the street it’s worse than that. It’s starting to work anyway, despite neither of them wanting it to.
Crime isn’t like the films, or the telly, or even most crime novels, if I’m honest. Most murders get a whole team of detectives, not one or two working it alone in the rain. I got that much from actual old bill, and it changed how I wrote the dialogue completely.
The killer I’ve written works the way someone writes a letter meant for a single reader, delivered without ever raising their voice.