Bright Spark

The killing got easier once the clotted screams had subsided, once he’d embraced what he was, what he was always meant to be; the man his father had made out of the boy, hard brick from soft clay.’

Harkness is a newly promoted detective sergeant with some old-school habits and a secret and lethal past.

A suburban family is burned alive in their beds, rekindling Harkness’ obsessive pursuit of the serial arsonist he failed to put away.

Yet as the body count mounts and his enquiry spins out of control, he discovers that others carry fatal secrets too.

Only when Harkness’ partner is almost beaten to death, when the prime suspect burns himself alive, when he betrays and bullies and seduces to get answers that could all end his career – only then does he start to realise that the murderous blaze is just getting going.

Confronting a prison drug-smuggling racket and a very ordinary evil stalking the hedgerows of suburbia, Harkness has yet more lives to smash to atone for his own sins.