The first in a series of crime novels starring the magnificent Catherine Berlin, a civilian investigator whose long-standing heroin addiction is only part of her story.
On a bone-chilling February morning, Catherine Berlin, investigator with the Financial Services Agency, finds the almost-headless body of her informant, 'Juliet Bravo', rolling in a shallow reach of the Thames. That Juliet Bravo's death is linked to an investigation of local loan shark Archie Doyle is no surprise to Berlin, but when Berlin's own unorthodox methods are blamed for the murder, she realises bigger predators are circling.
To start with, it looks as though Berlin will pay only with her job. And then, on a routine trip to her GP (one of a dying breed who will still prescribe heroin to long-term addicts), she stumbles across a second body.
Suspended, incriminated, and then blackmailed into cooperation by the detective leading the murder investigation, Catherine Berlin has seven stolen days of clarity in which to solve the crime - and find a new supplier.
On a bone-chilling February morning, Catherine Berlin, investigator with the Financial Services Agency, finds the almost-headless body of her informant, 'Juliet Bravo', rolling in a shallow reach of the Thames. That Juliet Bravo's death is linked to an investigation of local loan shark Archie Doyle is no surprise to Berlin, but when Berlin's own unorthodox methods are blamed for the murder, she realises bigger predators are circling.
To start with, it looks as though Berlin will pay only with her job. And then, on a routine trip to her GP (one of a dying breed who will still prescribe heroin to long-term addicts), she stumbles across a second body.
Suspended, incriminated, and then blackmailed into cooperation by the detective leading the murder investigation, Catherine Berlin has seven stolen days of clarity in which to solve the crime - and find a new supplier.
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1961. In the drawing room of an imposing Hong Kong residence, a British lord brutally assaults a young Chinese boy. His grandson watches, helpless. But he will never forget.
Wapping, London, present day. It's a warm spring in the capital, and heroin addict Catherine Berlin feels the clammy breath of the past on her neck. Battling to stay clean, and bearing the scars of her most recent case, she is struggling to outpace her demons.
An old contact has offered her a job investigating a violent attack by a seventeen-year-old public schoolboy, a Chinese orphan on a prestigious scholarship. The victim has gone missing, and the boy's patron, a shadowy peer, claims the case is being manipulated by the Chinese government. Seduced by the boy's vulnerability and the peer's allegations, Berlin journeys to Hong Kong, where she uncovers a conspiracy that reaches from the Pearl River Delta to the Palace of Westminster. . .
House of Bones is the fourth novel in the inimitable Catherine Berlin series, and a breathtaking and blood-spattered thriller.