August 1963: A schoolboy goes missing after completing his early morning paper round in a quiet English country village.
Keen birdwatcher Thomas doesn’t particularly like school and he doesn’t have many friends. Why would he run away? Why would anyone take him? What has happened to him?
Having failed to establish any motive for 13-year-old Thomas Watson’s disappearance, police are looking for a gypsy traveller who was in the area at the time. They have no other leads to go on.
Thomas’s parents are desperate to have their son returned home safe and well and due to the lack of progress made by the police have asked private detective Scarlett to investigate. His enquiries lead him into a dark and sinister world, where no-one can be trusted.
The Boy Who Disappeared
Launched May 2015!
Buy The Boy Who Disappeared – Amazon.co.uk
http://www.amazon.co.uk/ebooks/dp/B00XWDKAB6
Buy The Boy Who Disappeared – Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Disappeared-Liam-Hennesce-ebook/dp/B00XWDKAB6/
REVIEWS
“Liam Henneske has written a wonderfully dark and unexpected tale of crime and secrecy in the innocent-looking England of 1963. Nothing is what it seems in this gripping account of parental anguish and a literally lost youth.”
Alan Franks: An award-winning author, musician and journalist with many plays, records and poems to his name. www.alanfranks.com
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“With its short sentences on par with the writing of Hemingway or Fleming, ‘The Boy Who Disappeared” is one of the best debuts in the Suspense Genre since Ira Levin’s “A Kiss Before Dying”, made even more compelling by the fact that the ground of the Novella is based on true events.” Danny Reyntiens
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Everyone likes a good who-dunnit mystery. But the better ones also explore the why as well as the who in fictional crime, and Liam Hennesce’s debut novel The Boy Who Disappeared scores highly in each department.
It starts like a straightforward case for private investigator Scarlett (a mystery in himself, as we’re never told if that’s his first or second name) but develops into a plot with more twists than a game of pontoon. Too many clues would give the game away, but enticingly both the Great Train Robbery and the Phantom of the Opera make appearances.
It’s an easy read with a good sense of narrative, and cracks along at a steady pace, the antithesis perhaps to another private investigator, Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike, whose stories – while classics – meander far and ponder slowly. Scarlett is less complex, more empathetic, than Strike, but he’s a fully formed, three dimensional character nontheless.
But one of the really striking features of this story is the period authenticity. It’s set in the early 1960s and while for some this will be a nostalgia-fest, for younger readers it will bring astonishment that petrol could be four shillings a gallon. Indeed, what, they might ask, is a shilling?
This is the era when people drove Minis and scootered around town on Vespas, when they bought bicycles from the Littlewoods catalogue, and when they had to find a phone box – and pennies in change – to make a call. In terms of historical veracity, this is no less fascinating than the days of Sherlock Holmes.
Scarlett happily survives several near-miss adventures. Let’s hope this means he’s hanging around for a sequel, or even a series. Star rating: 4/5
Eileen Jones
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email liamhennesce@gmail.com
May 2015