First Novel

"Do what you will, this Life's a fiction, And is made up of Contradiction." These lines from William Blake do little to prepare the reader for the extraordinary events that unfold in this unconventional thriller where fact and fiction merge unnervingly. The action, switching between Tapshed, a small town in Devon, and London, focuses upon the police hunt for a missing schoolgirl. The hero, a minor but published poet, in the process of writing his first novel, unwittingly drawn into a dark underworld of pornography, becomes a suspect. But nothing is as it seems and the chance discovery of a missing chapter from the novel confirms Blake's view of the state of things.