Showing results by author "Jim Kelly" in All Categories

The Cambridgeshire hamlet of Jude’s Ferry is a lonely, forgotten spot. Requisitioned decades earlier by the Ministry of Defence for military training, one of its few claims to fame is that in its entire thousand-year history, it never recorded a single crime. But when a Territorial Army exercise is held amongst the ruins, a skeleton is found hanging in a bricked-up cellar, a noose round the neck. It seems that the ghostly village may hide many secrets and local newspaper reporter Philip Dryden is soon on the case.

Spring 1941. It is the third year of war, and when the siren sounds the people of Cambridge trudge to the city's public bomb shelters. Crowded, smoky, often raucous, the shelters have become a way of life for the poor. At dawn the body of a young man is found in a shadowy corner of the Trinity Shelter, one of three on the city's great open space—Parker's Piece. Detective Inspector Eden Brooke searches the body and finds no wallet or papers, save for a cinema ticket dated six months earlier.

As mid-winter temperatures grip the cathedral city of Ely, a man is found frozen to death in his high-rise flat. The police may think that Declan McIlroy killed himself, but journalist Philip Dryden is not convinced, and he begins digging for the truth. All too soon, there's another frozen corpse to consider–that of Declan's best friend. And suddenly a routine suicide gives way to a chilling trail of cruelty and betrayal stretching back thirty years, towards a mystery from Dryden's own childhood.

This short story collection offers snapshots of a life. A kid is set up by an old uncle to think he's going to be scalped. Seeing demons in every shadow a few nights later, he's told by an older cousin it was all a joke, that adults always seem to want kids to go through the same bad things they did. Just how they are. Shut up, he's advised. Get used to it. Hunkered in the dark listening. In the next room, bubbling a bottle with a drinking buddy, his Old Man telling tales of roadhouse glory. Bad odds fist fights, rearranged faces that stay that way.