Sam Dyke Investigations

Private Investigator Sam Dyke turns down a job that would require skills that he doesn't have - patience, computer-literacy, tact. Then he finds that the skills he does have - tenacity, aggression, street-smarts - are exactly the ones he needs for his next case - hunting down a cold-blooded murderer who seems to know what his every step will be.

Investigator Sam Dyke has never met his son Daniel. Until today. And then he wishes he hadn't. Because Daniel has a girlfriend who isn't really suitable... and, it turns out, is missing. In fact, she's mixed up in a world of corruption and violence centering around the Ginger Twins - monstrous criminals who extend their crooked web from Liverpool to Manchester and all stops in between.

February 1942: The Struma, a broken-down steamer, explodes and sinks in the Black Sea, drowning 768 Rumanian Jews fleeing the Nazis and heading for Palestine, and safety. June 1944: 31 SAS soldiers are captured behind enemy lines and are forced to dig their own graves before being shot and buried in a forest in the heart of France. Seventy years later: A young woman is attacked in the grounds of Edinburgh Zoo - the attacker seeking the document that might link these two wartime events.

For Sam, taking this particular case is not promising. His client is a secretary who's watching her boss fall apart, and she can't bear it. The case requires subtlety and finesse and so isn't his usual kind of job. But he likes her and takes it anyway. And he soon discovers that it's not the pressures of work that are getting to her boss. It's his colleagues, a group of cultish scientists.

Private investigator Sam Dyke is hired to find a man who’s been released from prison and subsequently gone missing. But the ex-con is an ex-cop who might have been imprisoned for a crime that he didn’t commit. Working for the man’s daughter, Sam soon discovers that this isn’t just a missing persons case - there are other people involved, including the owner of a high-profile casino and a senior police officer.  

He said, "Let's be clear: There are two things that I want to come out of this. First, I want to be sure I'm being followed. Secondly, I want to know by whom. Do we understand each other?" How difficult could this case be? Private investigator Sam Dyke soon learns, however, that Frank Wallace, the client, hasn't revealed the whole truth. 

Mark and Bobbie Ware have the perfect life—a huge mansion, enough money to satisfy every conceivable need, and a delightful son of ten years of age. But this all changes when a man disrupts that life by taking from it the single most important possession the family enjoys: its happiness.