Joanne Sinclair wants Leroy Martin's help to find a serial killer dubbed the Dorking Devil. The problem is, he's a criminal who spent two years in prison and she's the detective who helped put him there.
The unlikely duo team up to find the man and bring him down and, surprisingly, they make a good pair. But it isn't long before Leroy's past catches up with him, putting them both in grave danger.
‘It’s you!’ he declared, registering who the intruder was.
His intruder was a beast of a man, dressed all in black. He stood at six foot four and weighed around two hundred and forty pounds. He held the knife in his right hand and in the left he held up a sheet of newspaper. He looked at the paper and said, ‘Yes, the Dorking Devil, as you people have named me. In the flesh.’
He flipped the paper around to face Shaw and recited from memory what it said. ‘Today, MP Richard Shaw declared that if he is elected as prime minister in next month’s general election, he would go all out to bring back capital punishment for the barbarian the media has dubbed the Dorking Devil, after he slayed two pensioners last week in their cottage in Dorking. In a press conference today, Shaw said, “It would be unfair to compare this beast to an animal; he is a monster. And once he is caught, he does not deserve to be kept by the taxpayer's money in a prison for the rest of his sorry life. I will go all out to pass legislation for the return of the death penalty, even if it is for this bastard alone.” Now that wasn’t very nice, Richard, was it?’
‘No, No, No!’ Shaw protested with desperation as dread engulfed him, ‘You don’t get it.’ With his pyjama sleeve, he wiped the sweat from his forehead, ‘They weren’t my fucking words. Honestly!’
His whole body quivered as panic surged through him. ‘As a contender in the next election, I have a whole team whose job it is to tell me what to wear, how to walk, how to talk, what to say, when to fucking shit...’
He could see that the monster wasn’t convinced. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘As soon as I read this,’ he screwed the sheet of newspaper up in his fist, and tossed the crumpled ball onto the bed, ‘I knew what I was going to do with you.’ He grabbed him by his ankles and pulled him with ease down the bed.
Shaw wasn’t a small man, but compared to the Beast he was nothing more than a child.
‘I’m going to make you eat this newspaper while I bend you over the bed and do to you what a man shouldn’t really do to another man. Then slit your damn throat.’
‘W– what? You can’t. You–’ ‘Shut your mouth.
He swallowed hard. ‘I... I have money. Lots of it.’
Shaw could see the Beast wasn’t impressed.
‘Look,’ the desperation was as obvious in his voice as it was in his
sweaty palms, which flapped around in front of him.
There was a time he thought the 2.4 children and devoted wife
would naturally fall into place for him, but with his rise in prominence came a rise in unpopularity. Death threats and public scorn came with the territory and the daily cortisol surges had become a chronic irritant over time. He felt the adrenaline shoot through his sleepy limbs now; in an instant his muscles tightened, his body prepared to take flight.
seedy government ministers and police corruption as well as conflicts of love and morality which are set against racial prejudice and social etiquette . . . This is a must-read for hardened crime fans!’
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