From Publishers Weekly
Taylor's second novel about detective chief inspector Michael McKenna (after Simeon's Bride) and his colleagues of the North Wales constabulary explores the murder of a male runaway sprawled naked across train tracks. When the autopsy finds sexual abuse, the investigators suspect dark doings at the local orphanage. This gloomy Welsh setting is matched by an effectively dark tone: the interactions of the disparate police officers and their bitter but believable comments on work and life ("it's so bloody cold in here we'll be able to see the lies coming out of peoples mouths") sustain interest as the unhurried whodunit develops. Taylor's interest in character and mood mostly offsets the lack of pace from her circuitous plotting. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

On a freezing November night, 14-year-old Arwel Thomas, turns up dead in a railway tunnel outside Bangor, an apparent victim of sexual abuse and a runaway from the local children's home.

DCI Michael McKenna and his colleagues are slowly drawn in to the web of relationships and power struggles surrounding Arwel and his peers in the claustrophobic world of childcare institution, where nothing and no one can be taken at face value and ethical structures bow to expediency and greed. A world in which they find Elias ab Elis and his wife, blessed with worldly wealth, lurking in the shadows, cursed and impoverished by their own dark tragedies.

In this dark world McKenna finds families existing in a twilight of ignorance and stupidity and children consigned to the scrap-heap of life. Forced to confront his own frailties through his investigations, McKenna must probe the underbelly of this seamy culture in order to get at the truth, however destructive it may be.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly