Birthdays For The Dead
Detective Constable Ash Henderson has a dark secret
Five years ago his daughter, Rebecca, went missing on the eve of her thirteenth birthday. A year later the first card arrived: homemade, with a Polaroid picture stuck to the front – Rebecca, strapped to a chair, gagged and terrified. Every year another card: each one worse than the last.
The tabloids call him The Birthday Boy. He's been snatching girls for twelve years, always in the run-up to their thirteenth birthday, sending the families his home-made cards showing their daughters being slowly tortured to death.
But Ash hasn't told anyone about Rebecca's birthday cards – they all think she's just run away from home – because if anyone finds out, he'll be taken off the investigation. And he's sacrificed too much to give up before his daughter's killer gets what he deserves.
This is the second standalone book with HarperCollins, and it's one I'd been wanting to write for over three years.
Of course, the big problem's going to be that it's not an Aberdeen-based story. Oh, there's going to be bits of it set in Aberdeen, but the majority of it's going to be other places. Some of which DO NOT EXIST! Which can be a serious worry for some readers. It also doesn't feature Logan McRae, or his colleagues, in any way, shape, form, hint, sniff, or sneeze. Not even a little bit. Completely new characters.
But why? Well, because there's no way I could tell this particular story in Logan's universe. Apart from anything else, if I did, Grampian Police would never speak to me again. So it has to be somewhere new, somewhere that doesn't really exist, somewhere that I'm not going to get sued.
That kind of thing's important, you know...