Gone to Ground

Gone to Ground

(Grayson & Walker)

Summary

Will's first thought when he saw the man's face: it was like a glove that had been pulled inside out.

When police detective Will Grayson and his partner, Helen Walker, are called upon to investigate the violent death of Stephen Bryan, a gay Cambridge academic, their first thoughts are off an ill-judged sexual encounter, of rough trade gone wrong.

But as their investigation widens, their attention focusses on the biography Bryan was writing about the life and death of fifties film star, Stella Leonard, whose death from drowning, when the car she was driving skidded mysteriously off a lonely Fenland road, uncannily echoed the climax of her most notorious film, Shattered Glass.

With Bryan's journalist sister egging them on, and bringing herself into mortal danger as she conducts her own investigation, Will and Helen gradually peel away the secrets of a family blighted by a lust for wealth and power and its own perverted sexuality.

Reviews

  • Harvey is a master craftsman ... this is classic stuff.
    Guardian

About the author

John Harvey

John Harvey was born in London, where he now lives, while considering Nottingham his spiritual home. Initially a teacher of English & Drama, he has been a full-time writer for more than forty years. The first of his 12 volume Charlie Resnick series, Lonely Hearts was selected by The Times as one of the '100 Best Crime Novels of the Century' and the first Frank Elder novel, Flesh & Blood, won the CWA Silver Dagger in 2004. He was awarded the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for sustained excellence in the crime genre in 2007, and his story, 'Fedora' won the CWA Short Story Dagger in 2014.

In addition to writing fiction, he has written and published poetry, running Slow Dancer Press for over twenty years; his New & Selected Poems, Out of Silence was published in 2014. He has adapted the work of Arnold Bennett, A. S. Byatt, Graham Greene and others for radio and television, and in 2017, his dramatisation of the final Resnick novel, Darkness, Darkness, was produced at Nottingham Playhouse. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by the universities of Hertfordshire and Nottingham.
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