Book description
It's Manchester, July 1996, the month after the IRA bomb, and the
Evening News is carrying reports of two murders. On the front
page is a glamorous Egyptian woman, a socialite and heiress to an oil
fortune, whose partially clothed body has been found in a basement. In
the back pages there is a fifty-word piece on the murder of a young
prostitute found dumped on a roadside.
For Henry Bane, fixer, loanshark and legman for one of Manchester's
established ganglords, it's the second piece of news that hits
hardest. Determined to find out what happened to his childhood
sweetheart he searches his bombed city for answers, finding that these
two stories belong on the same page, and that Bane's world belongs to
others - those willing to profit from guns, human trafficking and a
Manchester in decay.
Tom Benn was born in 1987, and grew up in Stockport. He is a graduate
of the UEA Creative Writing MA and was the recipient of the 2009 Malcolm
Bradbury bursary.
