Black Is This Year’s Black

Brian McGilloway’s LITTLE GIRL LOST, featuring PSNI DS Lucy Black, sold in excess of 300,000 e-books. Nice. The sequel, HURT (Constable & Robinson), has just been published, and the set-up runs a lot like this:

Late December. A sixteen-year- old girl is found dead on a train line. Detective Sergeant Lucy Black from the Public Protection Unit is called to identify the body. The murdered girl, Karen Hughes, having a father in prison and an alcoholic mother had no choice but to live in residential care and DS Black soon discovers the only clue to the girl’s movements are her mobile phone and social media - where her ‘friends’ may not be all they seem.
  Meanwhile, Black is still haunted by Mary Quigg’s death in a house fire over a year ago. Her pain is then intensified when she finds Mary’s grave vandalised - Black is deeply upset and spurred on in her pledge to find the man she knows is responsible for the fire. But Lucy has to tread carefully: with a new DI to contend with, and her fractious mother, the Assistant Chief Constable, looking over her shoulder, she can’t afford to make a mistake...
  The stunning sequel to the number one bestseller LITTLE GIRL LOST, HURT is a tense crime thriller about the abuse of power, and how the young and vulnerable can fall prey to those they should be able to trust.

  Brian will be launching HURT at 7pm in Derry’s Verbal Arts Centre next Friday, November 1st, as part of the ‘Killer Books’ festival.