'There are echoes of Graham Greene in this stylish, thought-provoking thriller...’ Bookseller >BR> 'I glanced at the heavy flesh slumped in the chair next to mine, too close for comfort. Something behind the eyes made my skin crawl.’ Graham Young, disenchanted and rootless aid-worker, is seeking gin-fuelled oblivion in Jakarta’s Hotel Platinum when a stranger intrudes into his comfortable ex-pat life. Jakarta is edgy after the fall of Soeharto, the country engulfed in religious strife and violence. And Graham’s escape routes are cut off as he’s pursued by detectives investigating a rash of sex killings.
'Sidestepping sinister forces, Graham slides from a glitzy mall buzzing with would-be rich to the Moonbeam for pool games with ‘butterflies of the night’. But a thumbprint in blood, a student’s unwelcome attentions and malevolent interrogation ratchet up his paranoia. Terror surfaces even on cloudless Bali. And around every corner loom the shadows of treachery and unspoken guilt.'

This gripping debut will appeal to readers of Alex Garland’s The Tesseract and Timothy Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage and Renegade.

A murdered prostitute: Des McGinlay’s first big case should be easy to resolve. But he’s struggling to fend off the ‘big wallow’ – desperate to pull his life together as he picks through the wreckage of others’. Vin, who loved her, is being set up as the fall guy for the murder. Bertha, the grieving mother, wants Des for a lucrative future. And as a photographer, a dopehead and a right-wing politician are sucked into the vortex, the lowlife sharks are circling.
Bright-hearted Pearl offers Des a glimmer of hard-won redemption, but at street and canal level, down in the pubs and blues parties no one is playing by the rules.
In this masterly noir debut set in Birmingham’s underworld John Dalton creates a tense atmosphere of corruption and betrayal.