D/C Paul Winter has gone undercover in an attempt to infiltrate the inner circle of the city's premier drug baron, Bazza Mackenzie. Adrift in a world of easy money and brutally hard-won respect, Winter appears to be in his element. Worryingly so ...
But headquarters' concerns about Winter are soon supplanted by two high-profile Portsmouth murders. In the first, a property developer is shot dead with clinical efficiency, thus triggering Operation Billhook. Next, a government minister visiting the city is assassinated by two helmeted motorcyclists while his car is stuck in rush-hour traffic. A second investigation is launched, Operation Polygon.
D/I Faraday, Winter's erstwhile boss, is deeply involved in both enquiries. Working 18 hour days, with painstaking attention to detail, he begins to make progress - only to find himself suddenly sidelined from the mushrooming activities of Polygon. From now on, he must focus solely on the murder of the property developer.
Exiled to an out-of-town incident room, with a reduced investigative squad, Faraday becomes slowly aware of a web of circumstantial evidence with profound implications for Billhook, for Polygon and - most important of all - for the beleagured Paul Winter. The relationship between the two men has never been easy. But now the time has come to bury their differences.
THE PRICE OF DARKNESS is about individual loyalty and collective betrayal, about the personal limits beyond which most people refuse to go and about the raw violence generated by a society that has lost its way.
Read an excerpt and reviews here
Buriton tunnel, just north of Havant. Called to the scene of this brutal death is D/I Joe Faraday. The remains of the body beneath the train was chained to the railway line. Was this a particularly brutal murder, or something even more bizarre? With no name, and no obvious leads, Faraday orders a trawl through the Missing Persons list.
The detective charged with the task is D/C Paul Winter, recently back on light duties after major brain surgery. On the missing persons list, though not a candidate for the body in the tunnel, is a local solitary he immediately suspects of falling victim to foul play.
Two men, one dead, one missing. Two detectives looking for them. Two stories entangled in the most bizarre and compelling ways.
One Under is the story of what happens in the dark. The darkness beneath the glitter of modern life. The darkness we're loath to acknowledge. The darkness in our hearts.
Read an excerpt and review here.
Read an excerpt here
CUT TO BLACK
Time's up for Bazza Mackenzie. His chokehold on Portsmouth's cocaine market has earned him millions of pounds, money he's invested in a portfolio of legitimate businesses. Rich and well-connected, he boasts of being beyond the beckoning arm of the law.
The police, only too aware of the message Mackenzie sends, have mounted a long-term covert operation codenamed Tumbril to take down the city's biggest criminal. But when the detective in charge of Tumbril is nearly killed in a mysterious hit-and-run, the gloves are off. And it falls to Joe Faraday to put Mackenzie before a judge and jury.
Tumbril is a career opportunity of a lifetime but the team at the heart of the operation are fighting a war of their own, hemmed in by rules of engagement that leave Faraday deeply uncomfortable. His grip on events loosens further when his deaf son J-J is himself arrested on a supply charge after the death of a student from a heroin overdose. As Tumbril gathers speed (and the demands for a result grow ever more pressing), Faraday finds himself totally isolated. Just who can he really trust?
Cut to Black is a gripping thriller about greed, power, corruption and the iron pressures of political and personal compromise. (At the same time, it offers a remarkable insight into the on-going battle for control of the UK's multi-billion pound drugs business). Every British city has a Bazza Mackenzie. And every police chief faces the same question. Just how do you nail him?
DEADLIGHT
When Prison Officer Sean Coughlin is found brutally murdered, D/I Joe Faraday is called in to drive the investigation. Newly appointed to Portsmouth's elite Major Incident Team, Faraday begins to build a disturbing picture of the dead man's life.
With few friends and many enemies, Coughlin appears to be a murder waiting to happen. Was the killer a recently released prisoner on Coughlin's watch, a wrongly-convicted small-time gangster with a seven-year grudge? Or do the real clues lie buried even deeper in Coughlin's past?
As the inquiry begins to probe the prison officer's naval service, Faraday becomes uncomfortably aware that the investigative trail leads twenty years backwards to the Falklands War. Coughlin served aboard a naval frigate, HMS Accolade, bombed and sunk by Argentinian Skyhawks in San Carlos Water. Nineteen lives were lost to enemy action, a tragedy which may - two decades later - mask another murder.
ANGELS PASSING
ANGELS PASSING is a massive, Dickensian trawl through the depths of life in Portsmouth. With a compactly labyrinthine plot, uniquely human policemen, a grotesque rogues' gallery of squalid villains and a shadowy child as its anti-hero, it is easily the best novel that Graham Hurley has ever written.
Focussed around two investigations - the hunt for a ten year-old boy who may be linked to the death of a teenage girl, and a murder enquiry prompted by the discovery of the body of a small-time crook on wasteland north of the city - Hurley takes us to the core of his hero Joe Faraday's flawed relationships with both his girlfriend and his son. He also reveals more of D/C Winter's brutally effective take on the job and provides a grimly recognisable port-mortem report on a society that is coming apart at the seams.
This is at once an unremittingly realistic, fast-moving crime thriller and a bleakly compassionate novel about the price children are paying for a society that is in free fall.
THE TAKE
DI
Joe Faraday's Management Assistant, Vanessa Parry, is dead. Killed in
a head-on car smash. Her funeral is a bitter end to another grim week
in the front line of the ongoing war against Portsmouth's surging crimewave.
And now the seemingly untouchable D/S Paul Winter: master of the scam,
has been hurt in a way he could never have imagined. : his wife has cancer.
It's inoperable and she has barely three months to live. But when life
lays a finger on Paul Winter, he has only one instinct - lash out. And
lash out hard.
But there's precious little time for grief on a Portsmouth CID squad.
A disgraced gynaecological surgeon is missing and his caseload of maimed
women is a murder-suspect list from hell. While the serial Donald Duck
flasher has just upped the ante by inflicting GBH on a woman walking her
dog around Langstone Harbour.
It all adds up to an impossible workload and that's without the suits
and the politicians conspiring to make it even harder…
THE TAKE is a taut crime thriller that binds personal and public
tragedy. Just another week in the policing of one of the Uk's toughest
cities.
TURNSTONE
The
first of a new series of crime thrillers set in Portsmouth introduces
Detective Inspector Joe Faraday. He and his squad of detectives are
struggling with an ever-growing caseload in a city torn by violence,
poverty, drug-dealing and petty crime. Budgets are tight. Manpower is
stretched to the limit. Who can spare the time for eight year old Emma
Maloney, upset by the sudden disappearance of her estranged father,
Stuart?
TURNSTONE explores the public and private worlds of Joe Faraday
at a time when both are in crisis. Finding Stuart Maloney, dead or alive,
develops into a battle not simply for justice but for sanity.
With an intimate knowledge of one of Britain's most turbulent cities,
Graham Hurley has written a crime novel that asks some fundamental questions
about the society we've made for ourselves. And in Joe Faraday, he's
created a hero who is determined that those questions shall be answered.
PERMISSIBLE LIMITS
When
pilot Ellie Bruce's husband is unaccountably killed in a mysterious flying
accident, her world falls apart. Old Glory, the family business, is on
the verge of collapse. She faces huge personal debts. And, worst of all,
she discovers evidence of a passionate affair.
Determined to unearth the truth about the marriage she'd treasured, Ellie
finds herself confronting a series of challenges that will test her to
the limit....and chief amongst these is her decision to return Old Glory
to solvency.
To do that she must learn to fly her husband's cherished fighter plane,
the legendary P-51 Mustang.
NOCTURNE
Media
graduate Julie Emerson is new to London - but London isn't an easy city.
An affair with her boss becomes all-consuming whilst her neighbour upstairs
first alarms, then terrifies her.
Both men, in their separate ways, want all of her....at whatever cost.
HEAVEN'S LIGHT
With
local democracy undermined at every turn, anger with political impotence
creates a hunger for change - and a fledgling political party struggles
to establish itself in Portsmouth.
Success
at the local elections returns power to Pompey First and slowly, Whitehall
begins to wake up to the threat. Today, Portsmouth.
Tomorrow......?
THE PERFECT SOLDIER
Molly
Jordan's son died in an Angolan minefield. She flies out to reclaim his
body, embarking on a journey which will change her life forever.
What really happened to James Jordan?
And who makes the real killing in the minefields of the Third World?
SABBATHMAN
Top
names from Margaret Thatcher's establishment elite. Selfish, greedy,
corrupt.
Dead.
Once a week.
Every Sunday.
Sabbathman.
THUNDER IN THE BLOOD
The
Gulf War is over - and all at the cost of a handful of allied casualties.
As the West congratulates itself on the restoration of Kuwait, investigative
journalist Wesley Keogh begins to rake over the war's dying embers, discovering
the story of the decade.
That the war may have been fought to a pre-arranged script.
That the West's finest hour may well have been a sham.
Alerted to Keogh's investigations, MI5 despatch a young MI5 agent - Sarah
Moreton - to rein him in. But what kind of pressure can you exert on a
man who is already dying of Aids?
THE DEVIL'S BREATH
1990.
As Saddam Hussein tightens his grip on Kuwait, the western alliance prepares
to drive him back to Iraq - unaware that a pre-emptive strike is already
under way, much much closer to home.
Then comes Saddam's ultimatum: pull out of the Gulf or New York will feel
the kiss of the Devil's Breath.
REAPER
1982.
The IRA hunger strikes are over. Ten men are dead.
The Provos are calling for revenge.
As Britain prepares for war in the South Atlantic, one man plots the
ultimate counter-strike.
His code name? REAPER.
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
When
a super-power confrontation threatens to get out of control, the UK
government declares a national State of emergency.
On the island city of Portsmouth, home to the country's premier naval
base, 140,000 people find themselves sealed off from the mainland.
The threat of imminent nuclear annihilation provides a nail-biting background
for an unusual debut thriller.
Only the rich and powerful have the means to escape.
Or do they?
LUCKY BREAK?
Neil Slatter broke his neck in a motor cycle accident. He was 19. For the rest of his life he would be paralysed from the shoulders down. Yet four years later, he concluded he was the luckiest man in the world. Why?
AIRSHOW
A
documentary account of the making and shaping of the Royal International
Air Tattoo.
Illustrated.