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"Why was the old man so afraid?”. The moment detective John Custer meets an aging Peeping Tom incites him to “conduct a secret campaign to find out what kind of fear makes an old soldier wet himself”, kicking off Lisa St Aubin de Terán’s tense psychological crime thriller in punch-packing style.
Though most of his colleagues think there’s nothing more to the Peeping Tom, Custer believes otherwise, not least when his keen observational eye spots that the perpetrator has countless images of “a series of girls, all blonde, all aged between five and ten-years-old, and all different but all disturbingly reminiscent of little Michelle Mason across the way”, and realises that some of the photos are of a child star from the 1940s.
So, with support from Sergeant Jolly Campbell, who has something of a crush on him, Custer’s search for the truth and justice leads him from the 1940s to Istanbul, Burma, Cairo, and 1980s Britain.
Sparked by real case histories of abused children, and endlessly surprising, The Hobby will have fans of character-driven crime fiction on the edge of their seats.
Joanne Owen
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The Hobby Synopsis
When police pay a visit to an elderly peeping tom, they unexpectedly stumble upon a loose thread that leads detective John Custer into a murky world of sex crimes and serial killings, of hidden graves and socially impeccable paedophiles. Ignoring the scepticism of his colleagues and superiors, Custer doggedly follows his intuition that there really is something very wrong that needs to be discovered, however cold the trail seems to have become.
Inspired by some of the many paedophile conspiracies that have been uncovered in recent years, and the cases of abused children, The Hobby is a psychological crime thriller, ranging from the fan club of a 1940s child star, through Istanbul and war-torn Burma and Cairo, to 1980s Britain. Custer and his assistant, Sergeant Jolly Campbell, seek to bring justice to the forgotten victims, while themselves going through their own quest for personal redemption.
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About Lisa St Aubin de Terán
Lisa St Aubin de Terán is the prize-winning Anglo-Guyanese London- born author of 20 books, including novels, short stories and nonfiction. Aged 16, she married an exiled Venezuelan freedom fighter. After two years travelling around Italy and France, she moved to the Venezuelan Andes, where she managed her husband’s semi-feudal sugar plantation for seven years. Much of her writing draws on her varied life experiences. And time warps, rural communities, isolation and grace under pressure are still the dominant themes in both her life and work. On the strength of her first novel, Keepers of the House (a new edition of which was published by Amaurea Press in 2024), she was chosen as a Best of British Young Novelist in 1982. After leaving the Andean hacienda, she lived as a perpetual traveller for the next twenty years. Then, in 2004, she settled in Mozambique, establishing the Teran Foundation to develop community tourism. She lived there until 2021, returning to London with a bag full of manuscripts, including her autobiography (Better Broken Than New, also published by Amaurea Press in 2024), and two new novels, The Hobby (Amaurea Press, 2024) and Kafka Lodge.
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