A Tale Of Two Titles

Apologies for the confusion, but I can’t make out if Alex Barclay’s new offering is called BLACK RUN or TAINTED – Amazon is calling it BLACK RUN but the title on the book is TAINTED. If anyone out there can confirm what the official title is, I’d be so grateful I’d probably faint. What we can say for certain is that the book will be published on November 26th, and that the blurb elves have been wittering thusly:

Twenty years ago ... A woman lies battered and bleeding to death beneath the gaze of her killer, her head bludgeoned, glass in her face, coughing blood with her last breaths. With a final, shattering blow, she is gone. Present day ... Special Agent Ren Bryce is in trouble. After the brutal murder of her trusted friend and therapist, Dr Helen Wheeler, and the curious alteration of her psychiatric records, she finds herself fighting for her innocence of the heinous crime she did not commit. With a dark connection to a savage murder committed two decades earlier, conflicting evidence, and the return of an old enemy hell-bent on Ren’s destruction, she must battle for the answers she needs to clear her name and find the real killer, whatever the danger, whatever the cost.

  BLACK RUN / TAINTED, by the way, is the follow-up to last year’s BLOOD RUNS COLD, which won the inaugural Best Crime Novel at the Irish Book Awards earlier this year. Will BLACK RUN / TAINTED secure Alex a second gong? Only time, that notoriously impolitic tittle-tattler, will tell …