Women with long black hair are being strangled, one escapes and is able to describe her attacker as having a damaged face but this is ‘Feast Week’ in a Northumberland town and fair folk have arrived in droves: people with eye patches, cuts, scars and birthmarks, strangers all. So the hunt for the killer is not easy, but the book is, easy to read, fast, compulsive, enormous fun and exciting. I really enjoyed it.
A young woman walks home by herself, the tapping of her high heels the only sound. At two o' clock in the morning, it's cold, the streets are deserted and she thinks she's all alone. Waiting for her, sleeping soundly in his bed, is her baby son. When he wakes the next morning his mother still isn't back. She's never coming back. Because the streets weren't as deserted as she thought.
Three women are dead and Detective Inspector Lorraine Hunt is searching for a serial killer. In Houghton-le-Spring it's Feast week, a time when all hell is let loose as the fair comes to town, and a frenzy of celebration and decadence provides a temporary distraction from the grim realities of everyday life. It's not a good time to be searching for a stranger. It's not a good time to be a woman alone.
Sheila Quigley started work at 15 as a presser in Hepworths, a tailoring factory. She married at 18 and had three daughters: Dawn, Janice and Diane and a younger son, Michael. Recently divorced she now has eight grandchildren, six boys and two girls, and every Saturday and Sunday can be found at a football match for the under tens and under fifteens. Sheila has lived on the Homelands Estate (at present with her son and two dogs) at Houghton-le-Spring near Sunderland for 30 years.
