Fast, funny, scary. A truly up-to-the-minute novel set in Belfast from a brilliant new writer. Now a major BBC/Scala film starring David Thewlis and Robert Lindsay.
Dan Starkey is a young journalist in Belfast, who shares with his wife, Patricia, a prodigious appetite for drinking and dancing. Then Dan meets Margaret, a beautiful and apparently impoverished student, and things begin to get out of hand. And then, terrifyingly, Margaret is murdered. Is it because of her liaison with Dan? Is it because she was not exactly who she claimed to be? Is it the IRA? A Protestant extremist group? A jealous lover? Before long, Dan is a target himself, running as fast as he can in a race against time to crack the mystery and save his marriage.
Colin Bateman was born in Northern Ireland in 1962 and educated at Bangor Grammar School before joining the ‘County Down Spectator’, where he became the deputy editor until 1996. In 1990 he received a Journalist’s Fellowship to Oxford University for his reports from Uganda and has received a Northern Ireland Press Award for his weekly satirical column. He won the Betty Trask Award in 1994.